


Sweetheart

by stoprobbers



Series: Sweetheart!Verse [1]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 01:21:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1247413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stoprobbers/pseuds/stoprobbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>i belong with you, you belong with me, you’re my sweetheart</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. chapter one

She has been waiting practically her whole life, she thinks, to go to university, but standing on the stoop in front of her flat, arms laden with groceries and drug store purchases and bags overstuffed with a million little items she never even realized were essential to her daily life she feels wholly wrong-footed about the whole affair.

 She grew up in modest settings and everyone can see it, glaring and over-bright even off on a side street flooded with dozens of other new undergraduates. Oxford is not a university for scrappy young women from East London but Rose has always bristled at the shoulds of the world. So scrappy she may be, she thinks as her arms shake under the weight of plastic bags and she tightens her teeth around her still-packaged undergraduate robes, but it was her smarts that got her here and here she’s going to stay, laughs and stares bedamned. As she tries to re-focus her attention on getting the hand holding her keys up to front door’s lock, a group of girls pass behind her and giggle.

 _They’re not laughing at you_ , she tells herself firmly,  _They probably don’t even know you’re here. Don’t get paranoid._

A wave of missing her mum passes over her, so strong it nearly makes her knees buckle.

"Hey, hey," a voice says behind her and someone is trying to wrestle the university robes from her mouth. She hangs on tighter, purely from instinct, then realizes whoever this stranger is they’re trying to help and lets go. Unfortunately relaxing one set of muscles relaxes another and the keys go tumbling to the concrete.

"Oh!" It’s a near-wail of frustration, it had taken two-thirds of the walk from the bus to even wrestle those out of her purse, but it seems only to provoke a chuckle from her unexpected savior. The chuckle is low, deep, and she has just registered that whoever has stopped to help her is male when she sees a head of wild brown hair duck through her vision. From his kneeling position the boy looks up at her and all the air whooshes out of her lungs. His eyes are huge, the same rich brown as his hair, and framed by incredibly expressive eyebrows (one of which is high on his forehead with amusement). The eyes arrest her for a moment, deep and somehow unknowable, in a way that makes every contrarian bone in her body sing; he may fancy himself unknowable but she wants to know him, in every sense of the word. She’s so taken by this thought she nearly forgets to take in the rest of his face – his prominent nose and full lips, spread into a huge grin – before he’s hopped back to his feet. Standing, he is tall, much taller than her and she has to tip her head back to look him in the eye again. He’s wearing a suit, slim-fit and brown like his hair, not the somber black she’s seen all over the town in the scant day she’s been in Oxford, with a blue t-shirt underneath.

"Thanks," she says, breathlessly, and tries to reach out to take the keys but finds she can barely lift her arm. The mysterious boy chuckles again.

"Here, let me," he says in a London accent not unlike hers, and leans past her to unlock the door He steps inside, holding it open for her, and then looks at her expectantly. After a moment of gaping at him she realizes he means to follow her up to her flat. The idea makes her shift from foot to foot and he seems to catch her discomfort.

"Oh, no no no, you just look like you’re having a hard time and I remember—please, just let me help? I promise I’m not a rapist."

The way he says it makes her laugh and dispels the tension and she nods, trudging up the stairs with him on her heels. Her feet clomp loudly in their trainers, weighted down as she is by her purchases, and the three flights she must walk are not fun but at the top she feels a bit like she’s climbed a mountain. Stepping aside she nods at the door and he steps smoothly past her to open it. He holds it for her again and once she steps into the tiny sitting room she drops all her bags with one loud bang. It makes him jump, which makes her giggle, even as she pushes up her hoodie’s sleeves and starts to massage the angry red welts where plastic bag handles have dug into her skin. The fellow looks at her keys and the carefully packaged undergraduate robes in his hands then around the tiny apartment, finally settling on an empty kitchen counter where he lays them carefully. 

"Scholar’s robes," he notes as he does, "And still wrapped. Fresher, then?"

"Yes," she replies and realizes, suddenly, it’s the first time she’s spoken properly to him. "Moved in last night but I was too knackered to do anything but order Thai and go to bed."

"Oh yes, I remember it well. Everything I thought, everything I feared, was completely true, you know. Only worse. Much, much worse. Goodness, you’ve got matriculation tomorrow morning, don’t you?"  
  
“Afternoon, actually. I’m in Balliol we drew a later time. Sort of feels like my first day at Hogwarts and I’m Hermione,” she agrees, or thinks she’s agreeing, as she steps next to him and carefully unwraps the plastic to pull out the silk robe. She slides it onto her shoulders and looks down at herself. She thinks she looks like a bit like she’s wearing an unfinished tuxedo jacket. It makes her smile and when she looks back up he’s smiling too.

"Fetching," he compliments, "Well, I’ll be off then."

She doesn’t want to push her luck but if her eyes aren’t lying he looks reluctant to leave. So when he takes a step back she reaches out and grabs his hand, holding him in place.

"Thank you," she says sincerely, "I’d probably be down both my arms and a good chunk of my sanity if you hadn’t showed up."

He chuckles and his hand shifts under hers, turning over and lacing their fingers together for a moment, a moment so brief but so potent she thinks if she concentrates hard enough she can make it go on forever.

 "Nah, you’d’ve been fine, don’t need me I don’t reckon. But it was my pleasure."

They let go at the same time, and Rose’s palm tingles as she watches him give her a little wave and walk out her door. It closes behind him with a click and she sighs, bending down to start unpacking groceries and toiletries when she suddenly realizes she never even told him her name, or got his. She’s about to curse her own stupidity loudly when her door pops back open.

The man sticks his head and shoulders through, one elegant hand still gripping the doorknob. She stares, stunned.

 "I’m the Doctor by the way," he says cheerfully, "What’s your name?"

 "R-rose," she stammers out. "Rose Tyler." 

"Nice to meet you, Rose," he gives her another wide, disarming grin, and winks, "Run for your life."

She’s still laughing when she hears his trainers thud down back down the stairs.

***

The next day is madness, complete chaos interspersed with Latin and college pictures and meeting more people than she could ever imagine. She’s walking through town back to her flat with Martha, a sweet pre-medical student who matriculated in with her, chatting about classes and where to find the best pub in town, when she hears someone shout her name. She turns and catches a scarlet robe-shaped blur dashing her way.

"Rose!" the voice calls again and it all clicks into place, the voice and the brown hair sticking out from under the scarlet cap, and she stops walking to stare. Martha stops walking too, eyeing her new friend with curiosity as the Doctor skids to a stop in front of them.

"Welcome to Oxford!" he exclaims and throws his arms around her, sweeping her literally off her feet as he hugs her. She clings to his shoulders and laughs, feeling her blood fizz in her veins. In his arms she can smell his skin and his cologne and it makes her a little dizzy. "Congratulations, you could drop out tomorrow and you’d still have access to all amenities, libraries, and the bragging rights associated with this most prestigious of learning institutions!"

"Thanks," she grins as he sets her back on her feet. "That’s why I spent all that time on my A-levels and scholarship applications; the library card. This is Martha, by the way. She’s a medical student."

"Hello there, Martha," he says, sticking his hand out to shake, "I’m the Doctor."

"The Doctor, eh? Doctor who?" The med student’s face is painted with incredulity and Rose wonders why it didn’t occur to her to even ask that question until right this moment.

"Just the Doctor, thanks," he says and points at his robe, "Say I’ve earned it, no?"

"I thought you were a student here," Rose stares wide-eyed at his dress, "D’you teach?"

"Oh I am, I am," he rushes to assure her, tips of his ears turning red at the implication that he, as a professors, may have just bear-hugged a brand new undergraduate student. "I mean, I teach the same number of classes as any DPhil student, but I’m still working on my degree. I just happen to have another degree, too."

"You’re sitting for a second doctorate?" Martha asks incredulously as they start walking with the crowd again, Rose standing between the two of them as they talk sort of past her face. She’s on the verge of being miffed when she feels the Doctor’s fingers reach out and snag hers. She returns the hold before she can ask herself what the hell she’s doing.

"Have my degree in philosophy already," he explains, "And now I’m just a year or two off from having one in physics as well. Tried to do them together but it was too much work, even for a brain as big as mine, plus there’s all this lab work for physics and it’s hard to spend six hours with Lacan and then switch directly to string theory."

"Isn’t there a physics and philosophy concentration?" Rose asks, trying to ignore the warmth from his hand that’s climbing up her arm. "Wouldn’t that have been easier?"

"Ah, but that’s just the philosophy of physics, really, and that’s only a tiny slice of what philosophy is! Philosophy is meant to guide us through our experience of the world around us and science is only part of that!"

His thumb has started to rub the back of her hand as he speaks and Rose feels her face flushing, tries to fight it and knows she’s failing. She glances to her right and sees Martha regarding her with naked curiosity. She can see her new friend’s eyes brimming with questions she has no answer to.

"Which reminds me, what are you here for?" The Doctor’s question rings in the air a moment before Rose realizes it’s directed at her and not Martha and rushes to answer.

"Literature and history."

"Wait, don’t you two know each other?" Martha interjects as they break off from the crowd and start walking towards a small rack of bicycles.

"Met yesterday. I gave Rose a hand moving the last of her things into her flat," he answers as if everything he’s saying is perfectly normal, dropping Rose’s hand to dig in his trouser pocket for the keys to a bicycle lock. When his back is turned Martha grabs her arm and widens her eyes. Rose shakes her head;  _I’ll tell you later_.

"I’ve gotta run but what say we meet at the Lamb and Flag for a pint of bitters later? You’re not really an Oxford student until you’ve put a bit of money into the DPhil funding pot."

Rose rolls her eyes as he unlocks his bicycle and piles the chain in the modest basket. He straddles it, then looks up at her expectantly. She desperately hopes she isn’t blushing.

"I’d love it," she says before she can stop herself. Martha’s fingers tighten on her arm.

"Brilliant," he beams at her, "See you half eight!"

He pedals off with a wave and she watches him until he rounds a corner and disappears. Then Martha is hauling her around to face her, face contorting with the strength of her disbelief.

"You met him  _yesterday?!”_

"Yeah, like he said, he gave me a hand—"

"Oh yes he did, I saw that, do you always go ‘round holding hands with strangers?"

"It’s—" Rose starts, and then stops. It’s not like that, she’d been about to say, but what  _is_  it like exactly? She can’t think of any other time she’d met a cute boy and progressed to full-body contact and hand holding in the span of two conversations amounting to less than fifteen minutes. Faced with limited choices, she decides on honestly. “No, not usually, but did you see him? He’s  _gorgeous_ , and he’s  _very_  nice, and he’s… um… well, he’s a student at the university, a graduate student at that and—”

Saying it aloud pulls her up short, cuts her words off abruptly. Martha shakes her head at her.

"I hope you know what you’re doing."

"I don’t," Rose admits, "Oh my god, I have no idea. Are you going to come to the pub too?"

"Are you sure I’m invited?" Martha smirks as they began walking again, back in the direction of the knot of streets where they’d realized they both lived. Rose can’t hold back the blush this time.

“ _I’m_ inviting you,” she insists, “Plus, I’m sure a lot of other students will be there. You know… just in case.”

It takes four blocks for Martha to stop laughing at that, and four more blocks until Rose is no longer bright red.

*** 

The crowd of students is nearly as thick as the humid late summer air but Rose scans the top of it all the same, looking for one particular mop of unruly hair. Unfortunately, disheveled brunettes are pretty much the norm for Oxford in August and she’s on the verge of giving up and throwing herself at the mass of bodies crowding the bar when she spots a hand waving. Her tip toes are not enough so she jumps up and down a few times, finally catching a portion of his face and shoulder, just enough to confirm he’s actually waving at her. She worms her way through clumps of students until she finds the small table he’s somehow managed to reserve for them, including an empty stool for her. He’s dressed in the same brown suit trousers he’d been wearing the day before but instead of the jacket, he's wearing an old, worn-looking t-shirt, white with the silhouette of a moose on the left breast. His suit jacket is nowhere to be found and his arms are thin but strong, tanned and covered in a manly dusting of hair. For some reason it hits her like a punch in the gut.

"Hello," she says breathlessly, brushing past several other students are eyeing her seat covetously, mostly young women in absurdly high heels. Rose makes sure her trainers squeak as she climbs onto it, just to rub it in.  "Martha may be coming later on." 

"Ah, ah, ah," the Doctor admonishes, standing and pulling her off her stool for a tight hug before returning to his seat and pushing a pint of foamy amber liquid in front of her. "That’s better." 

She takes a long draught of bitters, trying to wet her suddenly dry mouth. She feels suddenly overly aware of the turning of the Earth, of the feeling of falling through space at 9.8 miles per second, of careening around the sun at a hundred thousand kilometers an hour. For one thoroughly mortified second she realizes this is probably exactly what the cliché of “swept off your feet” describes.

The literature student inside her despairs before the Doctor pulls her attention back to him.

"So, Rose Tyler," he says and the way he rolls her name around on his tongue makes her shiver, "Tell me about yourself."

She tries to gather herself, reminds herself to be cool, that this bloke might make her feel as breathless as if she was watching the Earth burn at the mercy of the Sun but that he’s still a bloke, and she knows from blokes. So she allows her face in break into a sly grin, poking the tip of her tongue out from between her teeth in a way she knows makes most blokes go bonkers.  When the Doctor’s eyes appear to glaze over for a moment she congratulates herself on being right.

"What do you want to know?"

"Literature and history, you said this afternoon, " he says, looking at her over the rim of his own pint, "What literature and what history?"

Rose would’ve started with perhaps  _where are you from_ or  _how old are you_ or  _how did you come to be at Oxford_  though she supposes that last one might be a bit self-explanatory, but it’s not the strangest question a bloke has asked her and given the little she knows of him, it seems as good as any place to start.

"Post World War II American, on both counts," she replies and he nearly chokes on his beer.

"What?!" he sputters, "The whole of history and man’s achievement with words at your fingertips and you choose  _American_?”

"Oi," she counters sharply, "Don’t say it like that. Not every girl is obsessed with Austen and Bronte. Some of us quite like Pynchon and Vonnegut, thank you very much."

"A fair point," he allows and reaches across the table tapping his index finger on the back of her hand. "Who else do you read?"

It is immensely hard to concentrate with him stroking his finger back and forth like that but she manages to talk about how, as a teenager, she’d picked up  _The Crying of Lot 49_ because of its whimsical, slightly insane title and found herself rapidly falling down the rabbit hole of post-war science fiction and postmodernism. He seems fascinated by her every word and soon they’re comparing titles, arguing over literary styles and post-structuralist theory. Well, it begins as an argument and quickly turns into a lecture, the Doctor far more versed in Lacan and Kierkegaard than she. Even though the pub is loud around them, she’s entranced by his voice, musical and animated, jumping wildly in pitch and tone with the same agility as they jump from topic to topic. Literature to history to philosophy to literature to physics, around the world and back again. They drain their pint glasses and another pair magically appear in the hands of a harried looking redhead, but Rose barely notices. Hands not occupied with the mechanics of beer start with stroking and then lace together, his thumb stroking hers or the inside of her wrist when he twists to rest their palms together, facing opposite directions.

After three more of those pints appear Rose finally thinks to ask after how and learns the redhead – waitress, barkeep, fellow DPhil student – is Donna, a dear friend of the Doctor’s, practically a sister he says. He tells her of their adventures as new graduate students, of nights fueled by gin and potentially fatal levels of caffeine, of insane professors and cutthroat students they’d weathered as a united front. When he first starts enthusing about her Rose feels something heavy gather in the pit of her stomach, something like dread that she’s not entirely comfortable feeling just yet, but with each story it’s clearer that Donna is the closest thing to a family the Doctor has. She tries to ask after his real family but he nimbly avoids saying a word, instead switching the subject to her mum and her life growing up on the Estate. She tells him about her mum’s at-home hairdressing business and she launches into the oft-embarrassing foibles of her youth happily.

They talk as the crowd begins to thin and then empties out properly, dissipating into the summer night outside the ancient walls of the pub. Rose barely notice, not until she realizes they are huddled close across the small table, speaking in intimate tones about the Doctor’s work in astrophysics and star stuff. She can feel his breath, warm and smelling of porter, on her cheek and it makes her eyes flutter shut for a moment.

"Am I boring you, Rose Tyler?" he chuckles, squeezing her hand in his. She opens her eyes again and grins, poking her tongue out again. His eyes dart to her mouth and linger, which makes her smile wider.

"Not a bit but," she looks up suddenly, realizing they’re two of only a handful of people left, and that most of those people appear to work in the pub, "What time is it? Everyone’s gone."

"Have they?" he lets go of her hand to shake his watch down his wrist and check it, "I hadn’t noticed. And it’s—Oh, it’s past midnight."

She catches his wrist, pulls it and the watch towards her face to see for herself, and he’s right, it’s 12:42 to be precise which is late, far later than she meant to stay out and far later than the pub should even be open.

"We should go," she says letting him go and reaching for her purse, "They must be dying to get home."

"Sounds like you are, too," he says with a frown, reaching over to bat her hand away from her purse, "I’ve got this."

"Hey, I’ve waited tables before. I always hated those couples who—"

The rest of the words get stuck in her throat as her brain trips completely over the c-word. Oh god, did she just say that aloud? To a bloke she had just met the day before??  _Oh Rose,_  she thinks to herself, feeling her cheeks heat up,  _You idiot._

"Who what?" There’s nothing but curiosity in the Doctor’s expression and Rose takes a deep breath, willing herself to forge ahead as if she didn’t just blurt out how much she likes him like they were still in grade school.

"Who stay for hours when all you want to do is just finish your sidework and set your tables and go home. Come on, they were slammed tonight, we should let them clock out."

"Never thought of it like that," he says honestly, laying a few bills on the table and sliding off his stool. "Usually just walk home with Donna."

"Do you live together?"

"Have a two-person flat, yeah," he grabs her hand as they walk out of the pub, no worming and squirming needed this time. She swings their clasped hands between them, feeling drunk and giddy and warm from more than the night air. He leads them over to his bicycle, chattering about his flat, in an old medieval house that he swears is bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside, and drops her hand only to unlock it. Holding the handlebars in his left hand he grabs her hand with his right and sets off in the direction of her flat. At her surprised look he raises his eyebrows.

"I live fairly close to you, you know. How do you think I happened to be walking by when you were succumbing to the laws of physics yesterday?"

"Didn’t think about it, actually," she shrugs, "Was too busy losing feeling in my fingers."

"Well, it’s a good thing I came along when I did, then," he gives those fingers a squeeze, "Wouldn’t want to put this in jeopardy. And you seem rather jeopardy-friendly, if your tall tales are to be believed."

They stroll home, the night warm and crisp and clear, not muggy in any way. The sky is nearly cloudless and the moon is nearly full, lighting the street with its glow better than even the street lamps. He tugs her closer every time she meanders a bit too far, walking his bike along the edge road as he walks on the sidewalk. Occasionally the edges of their trainers bump together and she stumbles, feeling lighter than air and full of drink and feelings she is enjoying far too much to define at the moment. He teases her about being drunk and silly and she tugs him along faster, eager to get to her doorstep and see if she’ll be getting a good night kiss. She wants, perhaps more than anything she’s ever wanted before including admission to this university in the first place, for him to give her a good night kiss.

They’re only a block away from her door and she’s telling him about how she met Martha earlier that day when the bubble bursts for the first time since she saw him in the pub. She drops his hand like it’s made of fire and starts scrabbling in her purse. He stares at her like she’s lost her mind but keeps walking beside her.

"Oh my god, Martha!" she cries, pulling her mobile out at last. "She was going to meet me at the pub! That was  _hours_  ago!”

She has eight text messages on her phone, all from Martha. The first couple are innocuous enough, variations of “I’m here, where are you?” but after that she realizes Martha had, indeed, found her but she hadn’t even noticed. She’s in the middle of a particularly raunchy teasing text when the Doctor leans his bicycle on her front hedge and snatches her mobile out of her hand.

"Hey!" she cries as he raises it to his face and lunges forward, trying to grab, "Give that back!"

He lifts the phone with a laugh, high above her head where she can never reach, but he’s been holding her hand and stroking her arm all night and she’s feeling drunk and emboldened and goes for it all the same, putting one hand on his shoulder for leverage and trying to climb up his long, lithe frame to get at it. They’re laughing until the slide of her body against his makes him shudder and she feels it, feels the vibrations under his skin travel straight to her core, and it stops her for just a second. He uses the pause to his advantage and twists in her grip, his back suddenly to her and her phone protected from her reach by his shoulders. She yelps again and wraps her arms around his waist, groping blindly.

"Oh come on, don’t read my texts!"

"I am not reading your texts, Rose," he says with a laugh, but she doesn’t believe him one bit and keeps reach and groping, finally settling her palms flat on his chest and her chin on his back. She can feel his arm muscles move as he does something with her phone and then his, and the way they tense when she wiggles against him, trying to distract him and get her phone back. When he whirls back around it’s sudden and nearly knocks her over.

"There," he says and hands her phone back to her. Rose only realizes that she’s still holding onto his waist when she has to let go to take it.

"What did you do?" she asks suspiciously and looks down. There is an open text message on her phone, but it’s not from Martha, it’s a new text that is just a smiley face emoticon. In the "to" box it says  _Doctor_. “Oh.”

"Looks like we made it to your flat," he says after a brief awkward silence, the first of the entire night. His right hand darts up and tugs his right ear.

"Yeah," she breathes, feeling the air between them cool and desperately trying to think of how to bring back the heat from just a moment before. "I um, thank you. I had a lovely night."

"Oh me too," he enthuses with a grin, that over-eager boyish grin he’s been giving her all night. It makes her knees feel like jelly.

"Classes don’t start ‘til Monday," she offers, "If you want to do it again?"

"Who says we can’t do it when classes are going? No better time for a pint than the semester, really."

"Right," she glances down at their trainers, unsure of what to do with her anything now. They are both wearing Chuck Taylors; his are white, hers are red. Both are scuffed and worn. She likes the image it makes and forgets to look up. He hooks his finger under her chin and raises her head for her.

"Good night, Rose," he says softly but doesn’t move, doesn’t lean down like she wants him to. She stares at his mouth, at the full bottom lip that has distracted her all night, and makes a choice. Slowly, afraid of scaring him off like a rabbit in the front yard, she rises onto her tiptoes and presses her mouth to his. Just for a moment, the briefest, barest of touches, before she drops back down onto her heels, but long enough for her to get lost. His mouth is warm and soft and when she looks up at him to gauge his reaction his eyes are still closed. They flutter open slowly and the look in his eyes is impenetrable.

"Good night, Doctor," she replies, voice huskier than expected or planned. He reaches up and touches her cheek and then takes a step back, grabbing hold of his bicycle and slowly, with a last glance over his shoulder, walking away. It takes her a moment to remember to move, to remember to breathe, but finally she does. She fishes out her keys, then her pack of emergency cigarettes, and lets herself into her home.

She changes for bed, into loose shorts and a t-shirt, brushes her teeth and washes the remnants of makeup and summer sweat from her face, then lets herself out onto the narrow back balcony for her cigarette. Her hands are shaking as she lights it and still as she starts to reply to Martha’s texts, trying to find the right words to describe the dreamlike evening she’s had. With only a little bit of self-justification she lights a second cigarette – this is a special occasion – and starts texting the entire story to Shireen. She needs her best friend’s input more than anything (well,  _almost_ anything) she can think of right now. She’s halfway through the seventh text when her screen lights up with a notification.

TEXT FROM ‘DOCTOR’

She takes a long drag from the end of her smoke as she opens it, dread pooling in the pit of her stomach like lead. She shouldn’t have kissed him, she thinks, it was far too soon and far too bold and he’s a  _doctoral student_ for god’s sake, he’s got to be at least ten years older than her and she misread this whole thing, even with the hand holding and the arm stroking—

Her eyes focus on the message, all lowercase letters.

_i’m so glad i met you._

She grins. She grins and she suddenly feels as if she will never stop grinning, will never be able to make another expression ever again, or feel anything other than this fizzing elation spreading like heroin through her veins. Her head spins, her lips tingle, and the dread in her stomach is replaced with a soaring feeling in her chest. Hope, she thinks. This is hope.

She texts back:  _me too._


	2. chapter two

They fall quickly, easily, into a routine.   
  
She has undergraduate coursework, four meetings a week and a pile of assignments that overwhelm her at times, whereas he's already completed his field exams and is working primarily on his own research. His work is mostly theoretical, and so most of that work is in the libraries, but a few hours a week he spends in his lab. She begins by visiting him there, stopping by after tutor meetings to chat and watch him tinker, and sometimes to do her own work. He helps, occasionally, but typically keeps his head buried in whatever he's doing, pausing only when he's burned a thumb or finger rewiring something he shouldn't. She starts staying later, longer, and then walking home with him, nothing more. There are a few more trips to the pub on nights when neither of them is overwhelmed with work and on weekends before he declares his graduate fellowship is worthless if he's just putting the money back into the graduate student funding pool at the Lamb and Flag, and invites her back to his place for a movie and a drink. For the first time Rose finds herself in the Doctor's home (and it is bigger on the inside, she has no clue how that works) and, shortly thereafter, curled up on the Doctor's couch as they drink Carlsberg in bottles and watch Mystery Science Theater 3000.   
  
When she teases him about his incredulous reaction to  _her_  love of American sci-fi, he kisses her for the first time.   
  
Since that first night at the pub there have been a few kisses, usually when they reach her front stoop after an evening spent in the lab, and they have been both infuriatingly chaste and  _always_  initiated by her. He never pulls back or away, always kisses her back, but only in the most perfunctory of ways. It has been driving Rose utterly bonkers. She's pretty sure he's interested; if the amount of attention he lavishes upon her even when he's working is anything to go by, he's utterly fascinated by her. She's just a nineteen year old from East London, who never really got out and did anything — except homework — until arriving a few weeks before. She still doesn't know much about the Doctor's childhood but she knows he's extremely well traveled and that he spent most of his youth in boarding school. She knows he's an expert in literary theory and several centuries of Western  _and_  Eastern philosophy, that he's a theoretical physicist (or one in training), and that he appears to be good enough at building things that he's giving an honest-to-god time machine a go in his lab's broom closet (it's weird and appears to be at least semi-organic, but she's not totally convinced succulents are really spacetime conductors). Yet he hangs on her every word and obviously preens when she hangs on his. She hangs on his quite a lot; he's got more than a tendency to ramble on.   
  
The sound of his voice makes her tremble and he never misses an opportunity to touch her, to hug her, to hold her hand, to flirt shamelessly, but at the end of the night he lets her kiss him, never makes the first move, and she does not know how to interpret it.  
  
When he kisses her that night on the sofa she thinks she might understand.  
  
She's reclined against the arm of the couch, her feet tucked under his thigh and her knees tucked under his arm and he's got his feet up on the coffee table, shoes off and mismatched black socks on display (one has a green toe; the other, purple). Her mouth is saying words, teasing him about watching silhouettes make fun of pulp American sci-fi, but she's mostly focused on the curve of his neck and the way his Adams apple bobs as he drains the last of his beer. He wipes his mouth, chucks the bottle into the recycling bin in the corner, and lets out a belch.  
  
"Chaaaaarming," she drawls, untucking one set of toes so she can poke him in the stomach with them. He catches her foot and holds it against his torso.   
  
"Always," he gives her a cheeky grin, "and anyway, as I was saying before you so rudely interrupted, it's not that  _American science fiction_  is bad, it's the choice to devote one's very prestigious and expensive to studying–"  
  
"You," she interrupts, yanking her foot out of his grasp and poking him harder, "are insulting my education by defending  _Pod People_  against my love of Kilgore Trout?"  
  
He moves so fast it should be impossible, that within the space of a single blink he's gone from sitting to sprawled on top of her, neatly tucked between her legs, with his hands holding her wrists up by her shoulders. His face is very, very close to hers.   
  
"Rose Tyler," he says, his voice deeper and rougher than she's heard before and then he's kissing her. But this is no mere press of lips; he savors her mouth, finessing it and then coaxing it open, slipping his tongue inside just for a taste. It makes her gasp, makes her open wider, and he takes advantage. His tongue, she thinks through the sudden fog of arousal that's descended around her and the roar of her own blood in her ears, is more flexible, more delicate, more obedient than any tongue has a right to be, and then she can't think at all, only feel. One hand lets go of her wrist to cup her cheek, guide her head to the right angle and then he seems to drink from her, slaking his thirst like a man rescued from a desert. Her hips shift unconsciously, her legs wrapping around his narrow hips and her now-free hand immediately tangling in his hair, mussing it even more than its usual unruliness. He groans, pressing his pelvis into hers and she can feel him through the thin suit trousers he favors, hard and getting harder, more insistent. They rock against each other, sipping from each other's mouths and then pressing deeper. He lets go of her other hand to brace himself better above her and she slips it under his shirts. Summer has cooled to autumn and he's wearing both a jumper and a vest, and his skin is so, so warm underneath the layers.   
  
As they grope blindly at each other, their heavy breaths just barely audible to her over her pounding heart, she thinks perhaps he never kissed her before because if  _this_  is how he wants to kiss her, her front stoop would  _not_  have been the appropriate place to do so. At least the couch is horizontal; unbidden the image of them doing this against her hedge passes through her mind and she can't hold back the giggle.  
  
He pulls away and looks at her, puzzled. His mouth is bright red and swollen, his hair an absolute riot, his jumper pushed halfway up his stomach. Her eyes literally cross with want.  
  
"What?" he breathes out and she shakes her head.  
  
"Not important," she manages, reaching for him, drawing him down again. One hand slides up beneath her shirt, over her stomach and making her quiver. She responds by putting both hands on his hem and tugging upward. He pulls away from her mouth just long enough to yank his shirts off and throw them off into the sitting room somewhere and then they are kissing again and beneath her hands is skin, skin, skin. She caresses his back, memorizing every muscle and bone, finding a mole right between his shoulder blades. When she runs her finger over it he shudders from head to toe.  
  
Their hips keep rocking, a rhythm deep in their DNA working its way out into the open, and he returns to his own under-shirt exploration as he moves his mouth to her neck. She sucks air greedily down, never enough, not when he's nipping and sucking and oh that's going to leave a mark but it feels  _so good_. She lets out a whimper and pushes him away, taking advantage of his own arousal and surprise to arch up and yank her jumper off as well. No vest under this one, just a lacy bra she'd put on that morning hoping against hope for something like this, and his grin is absolutely filthy. She wants him to kiss her again, and he does, but not her mouth. Instead he leans down slowly and places a wet kiss to the rounded tops of each of her breasts. Her skin instantly breaks out into gooseflesh.  
  
"Make me young, make me young, make me young," he murmurs against her skin and it make her blood sing. He pulls down one cup tentatively, like he's almost afraid of what he'll find there, but he grins like a little boy at Christmas when her breast springs free. Her nipples are painfully, embarrassingly hard, but he seems delighted as he takes one into his mouth, swirling his tongue around it experimentally, every bit the scientist. Her hands fly to his head, fingers digging into hair, and he takes advantage of the way she arches to reach beneath her and unclasp her bra with a quick flick of his fingers. Her eyebrows shoot up her forehead.  
  
"You think you're so impressive," she murmurs. He lets go of her breast with a wet noise to smirk at her.  
  
"I  _am_  so impressive," he replies and sits up, drawing her bra off her, the scrap of material flung off in the same general direction as his shirts. He cups her in both hands, measuring and gently kneading. She can feel all her nerves thrumming and she reaches for him again, deciding there has been too much time since they last kissed.  
  
"Gorgeous," he mumbles into her mouth. Their hips pick up speed, shifting until they are straddling each other's thighs, flesh pushing and rubbing, edging closer and closer to release.   
  
Feeling dizzy from arousal and lack of air she turns her head to nibble his earlobe, each puff of hot breath against her neck making her shiver.   
  
"Oh, Rose," he groans, his voice colored by something like disbelief, and she moans in return, his name a long, drawn out sigh. He shudders and pushes harder, longer, into her hip. His thigh catches the seam of her jeans, pressing  _right there_  and she shudders with sudden release. He moans in return and bucks twice against her, then goes rigid and still. When his muscles finally relax he presses his face into her neck and chuckles. She giggles breathlessly along with him.  
  
"Been a while since I've done that. Necking on the sofa," he says after a moment, kissing her neck and then her jaw under her ear and then her mouth again, deep and wet. She slides her hands around from his back, stickier now with a light sheen of sweat, to his chest, scratching her short fingernails through the dusting of hair there. It makes him shiver again.  
  
"If you don't stop that…"  
  
"Is that a threat, Doctor?" she scratches again and he nearly purrs. "Because I rather like doing this."  
  
"I rather like it too," he says breathlessly. "That's sort of the problem."  
  
"Not a problem."  
  
"Rose–"  
  
"I'm nineteen, Doctor," she admonishes, "not a blushing virgin."  
  
"Yes, well, I am," he rejoins. She doesn't even bother with shock, just raises one skeptical eyebrow. He grins and swoops in for a fast, hard kiss, "No, I'm not. But I am quite satisfied for the night, tonight at least. C'mon, grab the DVDs, I'm ready to be in bed."  
  
She can't follow him for a long moment, not when he's rolling off her and good lord, the room is freezing, when did it get so cold? Her skin breaks out in gooseflesh again, and as she feels around for her jumper to pull back on she catches him staring and grins. He notices and looks away, the tips of his ears flushing bright red.   
  
"I guess I should be going–"  
  
"Going?" he sounds confused and mortally offended. "Nonsense, it's getting late and it's very dark and I've got a telly in my room and plenty of clothes for you to sleep in. I know you don't have class tomorrow, no need to go home. Just come to bed."  
  
She can only gape and do as he says, pulling her jumper back on but not bothering to look for her bra, and grabbing a random DVD from the MST3K pile on the coffee table, before she follows him out of the room. She's not surprised when he makes a beeline for the loo; she saw the front of his trousers when he stood up. The sight made her feel absurdly proud. He calls behind him to help herself to pajamas and she cautiously pokes around closets and drawers, finally settling on a pair of his (clean) boxer briefs and a worn, soft-looking Cambridge t-shirt. She waits for her turn in the loo to change, her knickers uncomfortably damp, and it's a relief to rid herself of them. Somewhat self-consciously she quickly uses his toothbrush and splashes some water on her face to rinse off most of her mascara before she considers herself done. The look on his face when she emerges is highly gratifying.   
  
He's already tucked in, flipping through the channels on a manky old television opposite the bed on his dresser. She drops her clothes in a pile next to the en suite door and crawls into bed with him, on hands and knees over the covers so she can kiss him again. He responds enthusiastically, pulling her down on top of him. The process of wiggling herself under the duvet is immensely enjoyable to them both.   
  
"I can't seem to stop kissing you," he growls against her mouth, hauling her close beneath the duvet. "Thought I might have this problem; 'swhy I had to keep my distance before."  
  
"Still not a problem."  
  
"I disagree," he manages to detach their mouths, pulls back a few microns. "Definitely a problem. My favorite problem ever, I think. I'll have to spend hours and hours trying to solve it."  
  
"Apply your scientific method?"  
  
"Would you rather I puzzle it over in the abstract?"  
  
He breaks away, scooting back to consider her thoughtfully, one hand stroking his chin like a mad scientist. Her whole body is thrumming with want and energy and excitement and it bursts out of her in a bright, melodic laugh as she flops onto her back and lets her hair cover her face. The corners of his mouth turn up in a smirk but he doesn't move, just squints at her harder.   
  
"Shall I fetch your brainy specs?" she asks, all cheek; the intensity of his scrutiny makes her squirm and she rises up on her elbows, as if she really means to leave. He breaks.  
  
"Don't you dare," he warns and covers her body with his. They're diagonal across the bed, bare legs as entwined as their fingers, and there's kissing, oh so much glorious kissing Rose feels like her head is just going to float off her shoulders, but without the weight, the expectation they had in the living room. Rose feels more alive and more relaxed than she thinks she ever has.  
  
"Ok, ok," the Doctor murmurs against her cheek after a while longer, "to the left, to the left."   
  
They scoot slowly, awkwardly, laughing at themselves and the way they get tangled, until they're laying back against pillows again. He tucks her in close to his side and she grabs the massive, paradoxically complicated remote (how would that old junker of a telly even know what to do with all these buttons?), gives up on the idea of figuring out how to get to the DVD player, and starts flipping through the channels instead. She settles on an old, distorted episode of Monty Python, then settles back into the Doctor's arms. He wraps one all the way around her chest and kisses the top of her head. Then he yawns.  
  
Rose doesn't remember falling asleep but when she wakes up it's dusk early and the Doctor is curled against her back. She kisses his wrist, closes her eyes, and quietly wishes not to wake from this dream.  
  


***

  
  
Autumn descends quickly. Trees turn red and gold and begin to shed their leaves as if they've been holding a grudge all year, and the air turns crisp and cool. The Doctor takes to wearing the occasional blazer with elbow patches which pushes him right over the line from ludicrously sexy to just plain ludicrous, but she finds she wants to kiss him even more, not less. She buys a bicycle from a high school kid four streets over and he takes he around to all the parks and woodsy areas, seeming to know every hidden clearing and unmarked trail. These little adventures begin to shape her entire life; she still attends her meetings and completes her work — even finds herself absorbed in some of it — but if an essay or some reading is going to cut in on her time with the Doctor, well, it just has to come with her. On long-abandoned footbridges and in little patches of grass amongst she slowly starts to peel away his layers. His parents have been out of the picture for years, he tells her, though he won't say aloud that they died. He had friends in boarding school, and one very close friend who seems to occupy a murky spot Roe thinks she might know better than she'd expect. He can barely speak of that friend, only to name him harshly Koschei and move on. He tells her of a cousin, Susan, who joined him at boarding school and helped lift some of the loneliness of his youth before falling in love with a London boy and eloping. He tells her about spending his gap year wandering through Europe and Asia, getting into and out of trouble, making friends along the way. She wonders where these friends are now — she's gotten to know Donna, what with all the time she spends over at their flat now, but everyone else just seems to be an acquaintance to him, someone who he shared a laugh with over a pint and left at the bar with a pat on the shoulder. She wonders how he decides what people mean to him, and why he's decided she means so much. She doesn't like to examine that too closely, is afraid of what she'll find.   
  
They bond over books and over bands. Discussions of literary theory and theoretical astrophysics last late into the night, often paused on and off for heated kisses and heavy petting. He whispers equations into the underside of her breast, too soft for her to decipher. She insists on visiting all the pubs and venues where Radiohead formed, and one memorable afternoon is spent locked in her tiny bedroom with In Rainbows on repeat. She makes friends, adores her mates, but not the way she imagined before she left for school, before she met the Doctor. She knows the she of only a dozen weeks past would be appalled by what she's doing, the way her life orbits around this man, would be absolutely horrified. She can't bring herself to care an iota.   
  
One afternoon in October it is unseasonably warm and Rose has her tiny flat's windows wide open, feet out on the sill, reading Derrida for the fifth time and feeling every bit as furious with it as she had the first. She is dangerously close to chucking it out the window and renouncing any interest in post-structuralism for good when a pebble hits her heel. She jerks her feet away instinctively and the next one bounces on her sitting room floor. She cautiously sticks her head out the window and looks down.  
  
The Doctor is perched on his bicycle, wearing a cardigan and t-shirt combo over jeans that makes her mouth suddenly go dry, still tossing pebbles. The next one hits her square in the forehead.  
  
"Oi!"  
  
"Fancy a trip?" he calls back, as if he's done nothing odd. She frowns.  
  
"Where?"  
  
"9491 Thooft, of course. Lovely little asteroid, just on the outer edge of our asteroid belt."  
  
"Sure that's not the chippy on Little Clarendon?"  
  
He points to a bit of shining foil tucked amongst a dozen other parcels in his bicycle basket.  
  
"Already got 'em. C'mon, let's have a picnic!"  
  
She giggles and is off like a shot, barely remembering to close the windows behind her to keep the straggler autumn birds out in her absence. She leaves the books behind too, grabbing just her keys and her purse and sliding on a pair of loafers as she runs out the door.   
  
He helps her perch onto his handlebars, a move that had taken some practice on her part and never failed to make her feel like she weighed a million kilos, though he never huffed and puffed and he certainly never complained. She's better at it now, and used to tucking her feet around stacks of books and one time a microscope, and he ducks his head round to drop a quick kiss on her lips before he pushes off. The ride is always bumpy and she's had a couple good falls, but it's all worth it for the heat of his chest so close to her shoulder and the sharp scent of him, male and hers.   
  
He takes them to a smaller park, what was probably once part of one of the college's campuses but hasn’t been for centuries. It's a bit overgrown and in this season carpeted with a thick layer of dying leaves, but there is a small clearing in the southeast corner she knows she adores and she is not surprised in the slightest when that is where they end up. She gathers the packages she's been so careful not to sit on and he grabs the blanket from the back rack, and they set themselves up a little picnic.  
  
He quizzes her on her literary theory as they tuck into chips and grapes and a hunk of well-aged cheddar. A bottle of wine seems to appear from nowhere, the corkscrew more obviously fished out of his pocket, and they pass the bottle back and forth as she complains about deconstruction and a perversion of linguistics.   
  
Full of food and wine they lay down, the Doctor with his legs crossed and one hand behind his head, his face turned up to the sun, and Rose perpendicular, also on her back, but with her head on his stomach. His free hand combs slowly through her hair.   
  
"Look, I'm not  _really_  arguing with you," he's saying, but she's not really paying attention anymore. "Post-structuralism is painfully dull. I've always been more for Aestheticism myself. At least Oscar Wilde had a wicked sense of humor. But it's not worthless, you know. And you're much smart than it."  
  
"Why thank you," she purrs and turns her head to look at him. From this angle she can only see his chin over the topography of his torso. Her eyes linger where his t-shirt has ridden up, and on the long, thin scar there. Slowly, she reaches up to trace it.  
  
"Where'd you get this?"  
  
"Hmm?" he tips his head to look where she is touching him. "In a hospital, where d'you think I got it? Where else does one get one's appendix removed?"  
  
"Did you get sick?"  
  
"Coulda been worse."  
  
"How long ago?"  
  
"Oh, years."  
  
"Yeah? How old were you?"  
  
"A mere two hundred, a babe in arms practically."  
  
"Ha ha," she rolls her eyes. "How old  _are_  you?"  
  
"Why? Want to make a dirty old man joke?"  
  
"Why is that such a weird question?" she rolls off to her side, props herself up on one arm to glare at him properly, "You know how old I am."  
  
"I knew that from the start. Knew you were a fresher just from your robes. How old could you be?"  
  
"I dropped out for a year, because of Jimmy," she reminds him. Telling him that little escapade hadn't been in the plan but she'd been drunk and half-naked at the time and the Doctor had this way of drawing information out of her when those two things were happening. "You must've thought I was seventeen or eighteen. Hmm, maybe I will make that dirty old man joke, now that you mention it."  
  
"How old do you think I am?"  
  
"I don't know," she flips over all the way, resting forearms on his lap and her chin on her forearms. "Thirty? Thirty five?"  
  
Her guesses send him into a sputtering fit of offense. He sits up, dislodging her from her perch and crossing his arms like a furious toddler. She has to bite her lip to keep from laughing.   
  
" _Thirty five?!_  Rose Tyler, I am insulted, I am hurt and insulted and I will stand for this no more! Everything I ever thought about you was wrong and I bid you good day!"  
  
She busts out laughing at that. "Doctor–"  
  
"I said good day!"  
  
"It's just math," she giggles. "Presuming you went straight through, bachelor's to doctorate, that's like ten years, maybe more. Takes, like, seven years for a master's and one doctorate; you're two years into another. You'd be thirty one, by my count."  
  
" _That's_  presuming I was twenty two when I sat for my bachelor's."  
  
"What, you weren't?"  
  
"Brain as big as mine, Rose? What do you take me for, an ape?"  
  
She doesn't reply, just glares. He grins back.   
  
"I sat for my bachelor's when I was nineteen."  
  
"Oh, now you're  _really_  trying to hurt my feelings."  
  
"I am not! Honestly, I was nineteen. Genius, me."  
  
"So you're what, then? C'mon, genius, do the math for me, I've had too much wine for numbers."  
  
She rolls onto her back, head back in his lap, and he looks down at her fondly. It makes her stomach do little flips.   
  
"I am twenty eight. Wellll… twenty nine, in a week."  
  
It's strange to hear him say it; sometimes it feels like he is so much older, older than she can even comprehend, but twenty-eight feels like something she can comprehend, can reach out and touch. Unconsciously, she does, running the tip of her index finger over the back of his hand on the blanket. The hairs there stand up at.  
  
"Rose–"  
  
"I'll be twenty in the spring," she says, looking up at him. He looks apprehensive, uncomfortable. She wonders why. "Look at us, a whole year in the same decade. I think that keeps us well away from dirty old man territory."  
  
"Oh, you're so kind."  
  
"Doctor?"  
  
"Mmm."  
  
"Stop frowning and kiss me."  
  
It is incredibly awkward, the way he hunches down to get to her without dislodging her from his lap. She dislodges herself, pushing him down onto his back, holding tight to the edges of his cardigan. He tastes like red wine and a hint of salt and vinegar from the chips and she savors him.   
  
They have been careful and cautious and slow, both of them feeling, apparently, like they're walking a wire, neither daring to make a move that could send them falling. But Rose feels like she's won some sort of prize as she rolls this fundamental, immutable piece of information about him around in her head, and it makes her want to leap for the first time since she kissed him on her stoop the first night they met, and look how  _that_  turned out.   
  
So she moves his hands from her hair to her hips, pulls back from his lips, and deftly unbuttons his trousers.   
  
He makes a few perfunctory noises of protest and you-don't-need-to but when she palms him he is firm and getting firmer, just as eager for her touch as she is to touch him. And she does touch, stroking shallowly at first, then squeezing, then stroking again, a little longer and more evenly. He is thick and decently long and she can't help the heat rising inside of her as he grows. He tries to draw her back up to kiss her but she resists and instead tugs at his jeans.  
  
"Hips up, sir," she orders primly and he laughs breathlessly as he obeys. Freed of the material he springs up and into the afternoon sun and for a moment all she can do is look, take in his narrow hips and the trail of fine brown hair leading to a thicket of chestnut and his cock, warm and flushed and eager.   
  
"Ro–" he starts but it dies on his lips when she ducks down and smoothly takes him in her mouth. He tastes of salt and skin, and smells like man. She tries to keep her own eagerness hidden but the slide of him on her tongue sends almost as many sparks shooting through her as are enveloping him, if his grasping hands and strangled groans are anything to go by. She repositions herself over him, pressing down on his hip with her free hand to help keep him still.   
  
He is not content to be still, however, and she lets him go with a pop after one particularly hard thrust. He is panting hard, eyes squeezed shut, and they spring open the moment she releases him.  
  
"Ro–you–guh–" he stammers and hauls her up his body, kissing her deeply, tasting himself on her. In an instant she finds herself on her back with his hand up her skirt and oh, she is so glad it was so warm and she's wearing as skirt, a skirt with no tights just a pair of little cotton knickers and yup, he's found those, and they made him make his Happy Doctor Sound. She loves his Happy Doctor Sound. Every pair of knickers she wears is donned with the Happy Doctor Sound in mind.   
  
His finger slip beneath the cotton and into her and every logical thought flies right out of her head.  
  
In the late afternoon everything goes hazy; hands wander freely, clothes seem to melt away. She reaches between them, strokes him eagerly, and then guides him in. He sinks slowly, taking his time as she stretches, muscles too long-neglected and then teased burning with relief as he fills her. He pauses when he is in to the hilt, rests his forehead on hers and just grins. She smiles back, both of them happy to be fools if fools they be, as long as they are fools together.  
  
His first thrust feels blindingly good. Her nerves sing, tingle, possibly burst into flame, and she knows this is going to be embarrassingly short. She already feels like she's about to explode, about to burst into a thousand million particles of star stuff, floating away on the breeze. He settles into a lazy rhythm with an unpredictable stutter step, an involuntary admission that it's been a while for him as well. Knowing that only makes the pleasure brighter.  
  
They try to keep quiet lest someone walk past, his groans and curses muffled by her shoulder, her mouth pressed, panting and gasping, to his ear. She fits her feet on the back of his calves and draws her thighs up higher as he pushes her closer and closer to climax. Her eyes squeeze shut and he whispers encouragement, filthy words and invocations, instructions and pleas. His hips trip, stutter worse than before, and she digs her nails into his back just in time for something deep in her stomach to snap. Through the roar of her blood in her ears she hears him thank her. When he rolls off her a moment later there's a delicious ache between her thighs.  
  
"Really, now?" he manages after a few long minutes of panting, clumsily shoving their plates and phones off the edge of the blanket before sitting and drawing the ratty old quilt up and over them. "You couldn't wait to seduce me until we were in a private, comfy bed?"  
  
"Is that what I did? Seduce you?"  
  
"Well, maybe not quite. I'd say you seduces me back in August, really, but you most certainly took advantage."  
  
"Mmm," she snuggles into his side, blood like warm molasses in her veins. "You're quite the pushover, then."  
  
"Oh yes, I'm a regular ol' doormat, I am. Especially for young blonde women, they seem to have a particularly easy time of it. Literature students too. Especially ones with a taste for science fiction and skinny graduate students who wear glasses."  
  
"Sounds made up," she dismisses, "Those don't exist in real life."  
  
She expects a snappy comeback, but instead she gets silence. She hazards a glance up and finds him looking at her, clearly deep in thought. It makes her shift.  
  
"I'm cold," she goes for changing the subject. "I believe you were saying something about a private, comfy bed?"

 


	3. Chapter 3

For a while everything is far too much like a dream. Every day is an adventure, even if the only trip she takes is from his lab to his flat. He is her universe and she is his, and he maps her with hands and mouth, naming stars and constellations as he goes. She probably would be failing the term already but he's equally invested in her mind, leaving her alone when he knows she needs to read, playing sounding board when she's stuck in the middle of an essay. She thinks about her friends from home, the ones who stayed in London for school or didn't even apply, who fell madly in love with boys of their own and are happy, maybe, and stuck, definitely, and she is fiercely glad that this incredible, improbable man appears to be as invested in her future as she is.  
  
But she is also afraid. She is sacrificing nothing and that is wrong.  
  
The first night after the picnic in the park, after they rode back to his flat and stumbled back into bed, taking their time to work through each step of the traditional dance until they were left sweaty and spent and sleepy, they did the last thing Rose would have expected after a day like that: they talked. For hours and hours, until the sun came up, about nothing and everything, themselves and the universe around them. The dawn came and she could barely keep her eyes open any longer; she was on her stomach as he traced pictures on her back, playing connect the dots with the freckles. When he fell silent and still she thought he'd fallen asleep and let out a deep sigh, accepting that this truly magical day was over and now she was going to sleep and when she woke up things would be Different. And as she was on the very edge of drifting off he spoke, whisper-soft and almost as if he didn't intend for her to hear at all.   
  
What he said was: "This is going to hurt so much worse than it ever did before."  
  
She wanted to ask what the hell he meant by that but he'd timed it just right, she was too exhausted to stay awake any long. She felt him press a kiss to the back of her neck and then there was only darkness. When she woke up mid-afternoon there was a cup of steaming tea on the nightstand and the Doctor was making temporally-inappropriate pancakes, and she let the whole thing go.   
  
She worries the coming Christmas vacation will put too much distance between them, or that she'll snap at him while she's writing her final essays and he's preparing for his end of term committee meeting. She cannot imagine that what knocks the first metaphorical domino over is a surprise visit by a friend from home.   
  
They're curled up on the sofa in her flat watching a movie on a Thursday night, neither of them paying attention to the movie as much as they're paying attention to the sound of each other's heart beats and the occasional taste of the other's mouth. Both are too knackered to keep working even though deadlines loom, preferring instead to finally take a night off to themselves. She's on the verge of falling asleep on his chest thanks to the slow circles he's rubbing on her back when her mobile rings, shrill and deeply unwelcome. With a huff, the Doctor grabs it from the table, hits "ignore" and throws it halfway across the room. She laughs even as she jumps up to chase after it, hoping the cheap phone hasn't shattered. He whinges as she does, and even more when it rings again.  
  
She can see the caller ID, which makes her brow furrow and him sit up a little straighter. He looks decidedly put out when she answers the call.   
  
"Hello?"  
  
"Rose! I'm outside, open up!"  
  
"What?"  
  
The Doctor's brow furrows behind his glasses but his eyes are obscured by the reflection of the television on the lenses; he mutes the movie and crosses his arms to listen in.   
  
For her part, Rose can't really comprehend the words she's hearing, said in Mickey Smith's voice, completely unexpected and not entirely welcome. OK, that's an understatement: it's not at all welcome, not at the end of the semester, not in Oxford, not while she's having a quiet night in with her not-yet-labeled-but-clearly-significant-significant-other. Despite all this, it appears that Mickey has turned up on her doorstep. She rushes over to the window to confirm it with her eyes.  
  
He waves up at her, mobile at his ear.  
  
"Just needed to get away for the weekend, your mum gave me your address. C'mon, open up!"  
  
"I…" she trails off and the call cuts off, conversation clearly over in Mickey's mind while hers whirls.  
  
"Who was that?" the Doctor asks and his voice, so much deeper and wiser and  _different_  from Mickey's East London cockney, surprises her all over again. She turns to him, gestures helplessly with the hand holding the phone.  
  
"'s Mickey," she manages, "He's downstairs?"  
  
His eyebrows shoot up to his hair, that glorious hair sticking up in all directions thanks to the static electricity from her throw pillows and a few explorations by her hands, and she wants very badly to leave Mickey on the front stoop and just tackle him, peel off his clothes and not even let him get to the bedroom to fuck him. He seems to catch the direction of her thoughts and smirks briefly.  
  
"Mickey the Idiot?"  
  
It's a title the Doctor bestowed on her ex early on, after she told him a bit about dating him after Jimmy, and growing up with him on the estate. The Doctor doesn't have much esteem for any of her exes — she can't blame him, really, though she finds his ire ironic considering how tight-lipped he is about his own past — but he seems to feel a special annoyance about Mickey, Mickey who didn't make her drop out of school, Mickey who didn't hurt her fiercely, Mickey who simply faded into the background once she got to Oxford. She never even formally broke it off with him, but she figures weeks and months of silence, of unreturned voicemails and emails, made the message pretty clear. Still, the mere mention of him tends to make the Doctor grumpy and now he's standing on her front stoop and– _oh_. He's  _still_  standing on her front stoop.  
  
"Roooose!"   
  
It is late and not a weekend and both she and the Doctor are at the window before the discussion can go any further, throwing it open and hissing "SHHHHH!" sharply at the young man, who looks a little startled to see the Doctor by her side. She thinks she might see hurt on his features, too, but she's distracted when the Doctor grabs her keys off a side table, crossing the tiny flat in only a few strides, and chucks them down at the boy. They land in the hedge and while Mickey is scrambling to dig them out Rose rushes to explain.  
  
"He said Mum gave him my address. Just wants to be out of town for the weekend. He'll be gone before you know it."  
  
"Oh no, don't let me stand in the way of a weekend with old mates," the Doctor says, holding up his hands defensively and grabbing his shoes before he sits back down on the couch. Rose gapes.  
  
"What are you on about? What are you doing?"  
  
"Giving you some time with him. He came all this way for a visit, wouldn't want to be the third wheel–"  
  
"Stop it!" she snatches his trainer from his hand before he can pull it on, "Don't be all stroppy. Don't go."  
  
He sighs, shoulders slumping a little bit, and kicks his other trainer over to where she's dropped the one she grabbed. She sits down next to him, winds her arms around his waist, and leans in to press a kiss to his jaw.  
  
"Mickey the bloody Idiot," he mutters, turning his head so her lips catch the corner of his mouth instead. "And I was having such a nice night."  
  
"Yeah," she agrees, crestfallen, and he pecks her lips again as Mickey clomps his way up the stairs. They don't move to let him in, letting him struggle to figure out which key goes to this door and milking this moment of privacy for all its worth. The Doctor is still tense in her arms and something heavy balls up in the pit of her stomach.  
  
"Such a nice night," she echoes just before her ex bursts in through the door.   
  
The Doctor and Mickey do not get along.   
  
Mickey brings out a different side of her than the Doctor. She may not have any lingering romantic feelings towards him, but he  _has_  known her literally since she was in diapers, and there's a way she can be herself around him that she's never felt around any other person, not even Shireen or Keisha or her other friends from home. He makes her, not sillier but perhaps a bit more honest than she is the rest of the time, her accent veering into the depths if her decidedly not posh upbringing, her laughter a little brasher, her mannerisms a little less refined. It's not so much that she's put up a front around the Doctor — the opposite, actually; for all that Mickey's known her a long time she thinks the Doctor know her far, far better than Mickey ever did — but that she's used everything about Oxford to distance herself from her old life. The old her is not the person she want to be her whole life; Mickey, whether or not he knows he's doing it, brings the old her closer to the surface than she's ever been before.  
  
It drives the Doctor bonkers. When they argue about football that first night, he stares at her like she has grown a second head. When Mickey implores she call her mother, because Jackie misses her voice and wants to know all about the Doctor and whether she can expect him for Christmas, it draws out a tight, clipped, "I don't do domestics." When Mickey goes to throw his stuff in her room and change for bed, the Doctor snaps, pulling on his shoes while Rose is too distracted to stop him and stiffly pressing an impersonal kiss to her cheek before turning on his heel and heading out of the flat. Rose glares at Mickey, taking his rucksack from his hands and placing it firmly on the small sofa before she goes chasing after him.  
  
She catches him just before he mounts his bicycle, grabbing his arm and keeping him from peddling off. His face, when he looks at her, is carefully blank. She wants to ask him what is happening, why this has put him in such a mood, but she's afraid to, afraid that if she says any of it aloud it'll give them the opportunity to row. They've not had a proper fight yet, just little arguments about dirty pants and toilet seats and why you can't just let the dishes soak for a week, and she doesn't know what will happen if they row for real. She doesn't want to know.   
  
"Hey," she says instead, "look, I know Mickey's being a bit of a twat, but he's really harmless. You've got no reason to be–"  
  
"Rose Tyler I don't like what you're implying. I'm not  _anything_  but tired and a bit underwhelmed by your taste in men."  
  
"If I were to pick someone to exemplify my horrible taste in men, I'm not sure Mickey would be it," she mumbles, looking away. His face softens then, a little warmth coming back into his eyes.  
  
"I'm sorry," he murmurs, tipping her chin up so she's looking at him again. "That was uncalled for. Meet me in the lab tomorrow? Usual time?"  
  
"Of course," she grins and leans in for the kiss, only to be interrupted by Mickey calling her name and something about food. The Doctor rolls his eyes.  
  
" _He's_  not invited."  
  
"Never," she agrees, eyes wide and serious, and he manages the kiss then, wet and deep but shorter than she was hoping for. She watches him peddle off then heads back upstairs to deal with her unwelcome guest.  
  


***

  
  
She manages to get snatches of time alone with the Doctor but Mickey spends the next two days being as obnoxiously centered in her life as possible and by the time they end up at the pub on Saturday night she is utterly fed up with everything about him. It's only a week before Christmas vacation and she would have seen him at home anyway and she no longer understands why he has felt the need to come to Oxford totally unannounced and insert himself into her life in the most inconvenient and unwelcome way possible.   
  
The Doctor, who has been universally hostile to him over the last forty-eight hours, invited him along on this excursion, which makes her feel angry, and frustrated, and a little scared. The sudden reversal is deeply unnerving, especially with the way the Doctor is smiling and joking with him across the table. She'd plonked down in their customary booth at the Lamb and Flag, slid over to make room for the Doctor, and found Mickey at her side instead. Now she can't really reach the Doctor's hand with the way Mickey is sitting, can't really get at his foot with hers, and settles on eating from the large basket of chips in the center of the table as she sips on her lager.   
  
The distance between them and how comfortable the Doctor appears to be with it makes her feel even worse than the last two days have and it must show because every time Donna comes over to chat or drop off another round of pints, she shoots her deeply sympathetic looks that the Doctor ignores. By the time they're on their third round she feels mostly like curling up in a ball and crying.  
  
And then someone calls the Doctor's name.  
  
It's a Saturday and the pub is busy even though some students have left for vacation early, done with all their assignments and with holiday obligations, but the voice — feminine and high and tinged with an accent — cuts through the din all the same. The Doctor's head shoots up, scanning the crowd quickly, before a look she's never seen before takes over his face. He looks surprised, delighted, and eager. Rose suddenly feels quick sick.   
  
"Reinette!"   
  
He's up out of his seat like a shot, just as a delicate blonde woman breaks through the clump of students near their table. They embrace, a warm hug, and then kiss on both cheeks, the blonde — Reinette, she supposes — lingering longer than Rose would like. The Doctor takes her hand, leads her back to their table, and lets her slide into the inside of the booth, maintaining the distance between himself and Rose. The sick feeling becomes strong enough that she actually pushes her beer away.  
  
"Reinette, this is Rose, and Mickey."  
  
She knows they haven't really talked about it, not in a formal way, but they've been together since her first day at Oxford, nearly inseparable, and sleeping together since October and she thinks that merits at least a "my girlfriend, Rose," or "my Rose" if the g-word is too much for him. The offhand way he says her name, links it with Mickey's, makes a heavy lump of dread appear along with the nausea. She manages a weak hello, regarding the woman across dark wood. She is refined and wealthy, that much is clear; her clothing is impeccable, tailored to her shape and clearly of ultra fine quality; so is the sparse but elegant jewelry she sports. Her hair is perfectly coiffed, makeup impeccably applied to fine features, and she carries herself with the easy grace of the rich and respected. The Doctor's face when he looks at her make Rose completely lose her breath, makes her entire body tense up with fear and fury and shame. She wants very badly to leave, to drag him out with her, but she's not sure he would come and she's not ready to leave him alone with this…  _woman_  she's just met.  
  
"Reinette was here for a year when I was a student, visiting from the Sorbonne," the Doctor is explaining and she struggles to pay attention, struggles not to let the jealousy overwhelm her, but it does anyway and the conversation continues without her input, without anything but the Doctor and Reinette laughing and joking and sharing stories of their brief shared time at Oxford. Donna comes by with a glass of wine for Reinette and the Doctor orders one as well, Mickey asks for another lager, and Rose stays completely silent. No one but Donna seems to notice; the redhead shoots her a sympathetic and concerned glance. Rose ignores it.   
  
Within an hour Rose think she might genuinely hate Reinette, except that Reinette seems genuinely interested in her. Rose tries her best to respond coherently to questions about her studies and her brief time at Oxford, with the Doctor filling in the occasional blank but not jumping in nearly as much as he usually does. The conversation turns academic, as so many university conversations are wont to do, and it's like Rose disappears as the Doctor and Reinette spar over philosophy and politics, which is apparently Reinette's area of expertise. She works in the French Parliament, Rose finds out, and seems to be especially close to the Prime Minister though when Rose tries to ask about that more directly all she gets is a mysterious smile in return. The Doctor listens, enraptured, to her rundown of French politics and starts comparing them to what's been happening in England, something Rose has never been particularly good at caring or talking about. As she watches the man she's quite certain she's falling in love with (if it isn't too late already) lavish attention upon this beautiful blonde it's like all the air's been sucked out of the room; she feels faint, and incredibly sad.  
  
Glancing at Mickey she can see him doing his 'I Was Right' dance behind his eyes and she wants very badly to punch him in the face.  
  
"Rose," she hears her name, but not in Reinette's voice, in Donna's and she looks up to see her looking at her with naked concern all over her face. "Are you all right? You look white as a sheet."  
  
She feels all the eyes around the table shift to her and the Doctor's shift almost immediately away, as if he can't bear to look at her, or perhaps doesn't want to. She's sure, now, that she's going to cry and roughly pushes at Mickey until he stands, letting her out. She barely remembers to grab her purse as she scrambles away from the table.   
  
"N-no," she stammers out, fishing around for her keys and then tossing them to Mickey, "no, I'm really not. Here, Mick, you let yourself back in whenever you're done here. Don't be out too late, you'll miss your train tomorrow."  
  
"Oh all right  _Mum_ ," he snarks back at her, "And where are you gonna sleep?"  
  
"Do you need my–" Donna starts, reaching for her pocket, knowing that Rose is going back to the flat she shares with the Doctor if she's giving her keys up right now, but Rose shakes her head and produces another set of keys, smaller, from her purse.  
  
"No, I've got my own set," she says, holding them up, looking at the Doctor and willing him to meet her eye. He's staring blankly at the keys, apparently a million miles away. "I'll see you later?"  
  
The question seems to snap him out of it, at least for the moment, and he finally meets her gaze, something shuttered and hidden in his, and nods. A tiny grin quirks up the edges of his lips, and then he looks away again, turning his attention back to Reinette. Donna follows her as she turns on her heel and walks away from the table, desperate for the cold air outside and maybe a quiet alley to vomit in. Her stomach is churning with too many things to name, all of them bad.   
  
"Rose," Donna says as they burst out the pub doors, startling a small group of students standing there and smoking, "Rose, he's being a prat, I don't even know  _why_  he's being a prat–"  
  
"It's okay," she forces out, taking a few deep breaths of the night air, "It's fine, they're friends, I trust him."  
  
"I don't," Donna snaps angrily and the wave of jealousy washes over Rose so powerfully she almost topples over with it. Donna seems to realize what she's done and raises a hand to her mouth. "Oh, no, Rose, that's not what I meant, you know it's been Rose this and Rose that for  _months_  now, he's completely mad over you. But the Doctor, he's not good with feelings and closeness and it scares him, and when he's scared he acts like a  _complete_ idiot. And just think about it: a man as smart as him, acting as much of an arse as he's capable of? It's not pretty."  
  
"Thanks for the warning," Rose laughs weakly. Donna reaches out and lays a hand on her shoulder.  
  
"I'll keep an eye on him."  
  
"Yeah, thanks Donna," she says before turning and walking towards the Doctor's flat. Her mind rages with a hurricane of emotions, jealousy and fear outweighing almost all of them. When she gets to the tiny-looking townhouse he lets herself in and immediately changes into pajamas, a combo of clean boxer briefs and Doctor's t-shirt that has become her second uniform. She grabs his Hulk shirt, one she knows he's worn this week and just as she hopes, it smells like him. The scent is comforting and upsetting all at the same time and she tucks herself in his bed, surrounding herself with the feel and the smell of him, the memories of countless moments of intimacy both physical and emotional overwhelming. She switches on the telly in an attempt to distract herself, settles in, and waits.  
  


***

  
  
Donna is sitting on the sofa having a beer of her own, watching a rerun of the Graham Norton show when the Doctor finally comes stumbling in. It's past three in the morning and he looks tired, rumpled, and a little afraid if the wary look he gives her is anything to go by. She knows Rose is upstairs in his room, and doubts she's asleep — she doesn't know for sure, only heard the telly through his bedroom door, but she knows if her bloke was out with another woman all night she wouldn't be able to catch a wink. He stops on the threshold of the stairway and the living room and looks at her, waiting for what he knows is coming.  
  
"You're in trouble, Spaceman," Donna says dryly. He looks away, almost guilty, then back, defiant. A bad sign, she knows.   
  
"Why am I in trouble? What did I do, eh?"  
  
Donna doesn't reply, just raises one eyebrow slowly.   
  
"Nothing happened!"  
  
"You've got lipstick."  
  
"On my  _cheek_ ," he frowns and scrubs it angrily away, "She's  _French_."  
  
"Oh yes, we all caught that," she rolls her eyes. "There was the accent, and the way you mentioned it five hundred times. She's fucking the Prime Minister, you know."  
  
"How is  _that_ any of my business?!"  
  
"Just thought you might want to know. She wasn't very subtle about it. I hope you used protection, wouldn't want to pass any of that on to Ro–"  
  
"I did  _not_  sleep with her."  
  
"Oh? And what were you doing 'til three a.m. then?"  
  
"Talking! Catching up! We took a walk around town, reminiscing a bit. Completely harmless."  
  
"Oh yes, I'm sure your girlfriend would agree."  
  
"She's not my–Oh, Rose. You mean Rose."  
  
"Of course I mean Rose, you dumbo, who else would I mean?!"  
  
"Rose is not my girlfriend."  
  
"Oh no? Could've fooled me! I mean, she's here every night that you're not at her place, and you hold her hand everywhere you go, and talk in that disgusting code where you don't even use  _words_ half the time, just look at each other like some googly-eyed teenagers, and I know what you get up to when you've got that door locked, since you seem so keen to forget how thin these walls are. So if she's not your girlfriend,  _Spaceman_ , then  _what is she_?!"  
  
He looks bowled over, as if he wasn't expecting to get such a thorough chewing out immediately upon walking through the door. He opens and closing his mouth a few times, searching for an answer.  
  
"She's… she's… Well, she's Rose. My Rose."  
  
"I doubt that."  
  
"What's  _that_  supposed to mean?"  
  
"It means that if I were Rose and you pulled on me what you just pulled on her, I wouldn't even be up there waiting for you anymore, I'd have thrown all your shit out the window and gone by now. You're a lucky man, Doctor, that she's still just up there watching telly in your bed, and you  _better not blow this_."  
  
"And why do you care, eh? Why does it matter to you?" he snaps, angry himself now and not sure why. Something gnaws at his stomach, the same thing that's been gnawing at it all night as he laughed and talked with Reinette, letting himself release all the tension that had been building since Mickey the Idiot had shown up in her company. He knows that thing is guilt but he refuses to acknowledge it, as it would force him to admit his behavior tonight has been something to feel guilty about, and he's not going to do that. Nothing happened, after all. Nothing aside from that good night kiss, and that hadn't even been his doing, all Reinette, and any response was just reflex. He'd cut it off. He'd told her, firmly, that he wasn't available, and he'd left her at her hotel and returned home to Rose. Rose who is apparently still upstairs and waiting for him. He isn't sure if he feels good about that or not; mostly, he hopes she is asleep and he can just climb into bed with her and they can never speak of this night again.   
  
"Because I  _like_  Rose, and I like  _you_  when you're around Rose, and I want her to  _stay_  around. I thought you were crazy, you know, when you first started seeing her, she was so much younger than you and so different. But she's  _good_  for you Doctor, and if you threw that away for some French tart–"  
  
"I told you, nothing happened," he repeats, low and dangerous. Donna rolls her eyes at him and returns her eyes to the television, conversation apparently over.   
  
The climb up the stairs is awful, they seem a mile long, and he takes it slowly, pausing outside his door to square his shoulders. He can hear the TV blaring as he pushes open the door. He'd been envisioning Rose tucked up in his bed, warm and inviting and everything he wants, imagining helping himself into her arms and then into her, taking forgiveness for a transgression he's unwilling to admit he committed in kisses and caresses and gasps of pleasure; instead he finds her sitting on the covers, wearing her jeans and his t-shirt, and shoes. The bed is neatly made which is a very, very bad sign.   
  
Looking at her face he sees her nose is red and her cheeks stained; she's been crying. Raising his eyes to lock with hers he gulps as he sees she is also plainly  _furious_. Dread washes through him and he says the first thing that pops to mind.  
  
"How long did you wait?"  
  
The fury in her eyes deepens, darkens, and turns cold as ash.   
  
"Five and a half hours," she spits out and jumps up from the bed, grabbing her purse and her coat and storming past him with nary another glance. A moment later the front door slams. He sits down on the bed, puts his head in his hands, and lets out a deep sigh, alone.


	4. Chapter 4

She goes home a week early. Sleep doesn't come, not at all that first night and not much the second either, and she channels it into work, furiously finishing essays, sending them off to her tutors, changing her train ticket back to London and letting her mum know she'll be home for Christmas before she knows it. Every time she closes her eyes she sees him, rumpled and with a streak of pink lipstick by the corner of his mouth, his hair tousled by fingers that aren't hers, his shirt askew. It makes her sick every time so she doesn't close her eyes, just switches from tea to coffee and keeps going until she literally passes out on her sofa, her body unable to keep going any longer.   
  
When she wakes up she has three missed calls from Donna, one from her mother, and a text message from the Doctor. It says "I'm sorry," and she throws up nothing for half an hour before dragging herself to her room to pack for home.   
  
When she makes it back to the estate her mother tuts and tsks over her appearance, bedraggled and exhausted, great big bags under her eyes. She tries to coax out of her what happened but Rose refuses to talk about it, doesn't want to think about it, or why it bothers her so much. Bothers her, what a joke; she doesn't want to explain that this man, this man who swept her off her feet her first day at Oxford and took over her entire life just as she promised would never happen, spent an evening flirting with a fancy French lady and has broken her heart.   
  
She will never hear the end of it and she cannot tolerate that right now.   
  
Instead her mother snarks on her for putting on airs and graces and sends her to the butcher to pick up the Christmas turkey.  
  
On her way home she runs into Mickey outside the estate. For days now she's felt sad and empty, alone and broken and vulnerable, but when she sees his grinning face it all flashes over into anger, into fury, and when he acts innocent and bewildered she loses it. She screams at him, throws satsumas at his head and face, pushing back tears in favor of rage. He yells back, accuses her of cheating on him, of leading him on, and her voice goes deadly quiet when she tells him she doesn't care.   
  
"He's not my boyfriend," she growls, advancing on him like a lioness stalking prey,   
"He's better than that. He's much better than that, and he's much more than that. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life; he's my _everything_  and you, you're nothing but a… a tin dog! Useless and empty and irrelevant, you should be rusting in a corner!"  
  
He looks stunned and deeply hurt and she  _knows_  that it's uncalled for, to heap everything on his shoulders like that, as if the Doctor wasn't the one who pushed her away, who left her, who came back five and a half hours later smelling of another woman, strongly enough that she caught the scent from across the room, but Mickey, she knows, was the catalyst that made the first domino in the disaster tip over and he's the one who's right in front of her, available for her anger to be taken out on. She grits her teeth together, balling her hands into fists to keep from slapping him, and grabs her groceries before he can reply. She drops them inside the front door, ignoring her mother's indignant questions about where did half the oranges go, and locks herself in her room. The dam breaks then, all the emotions and fear and tears she's been holding inside and she cocoons herself in the too-pink duvet, sobbing until she feels she's shed every tear in her body and she has no choice but to fall asleep.   
  
She wakes up to a cold mug of tea and a tall glass of water on her night table next to the alarm clock that reads either mid-evening or very early morning. She chugs the water and goes back to sleep before she can get drawn into the dangerous cycle of thinking again.   
  
Her phone's been off since she left university and when she finally turns it back on it makes obnoxious noises at her for nearly five minutes straight. There are dozens of text messages and voicemails for her to sort through. She answers Donna's first, assuring the woman she's alive and home safe for the Christmas holiday, that she'll be back in Oxford for the next term, that they're still friends, that she believes Donna when she says the Doctor didn't sleep with Reinette and no, that doesn't make it any better. Martha next, the same basic assurances, the same brief tone. There is one apology from Mickey, curt and almost sarcastic,  _I'm sorry ok_ , which she deletes without a thought. She's not ready for that yet.  
  
The rest of the texts, and all of the voicemails, are from the Doctor.   
  
They start of slow and tentative, just her name and  _I'm sorry_  over and over again and a gently implored, "Please, call me." Then they escalate, a brief burst of anger and then fear, so much fear, is she all right, is she alive, she's not at her flat did she go back to London, no one's heard from her Rose please, tell me you're safe. The sound of his voice, worried and vulnerable, brings on another round of tears that she only half manages to choke back, the strain of holding it in giving her a headache. At the very end is a voicemail from Donna, quiet and short.  
  
"Rose, please call me back. We're all worried."  
  
She's calling before she can really think it through. Donna picks up on the first ring.  
  
"Rose!"  
  
"I'm all right," she says and her voice is hoarse and harsh from screaming and sleep and disuse.   
  
"You don't sound–"  
  
"I just woke up. I'm home, I'm at my mum's, everything is fine."  
  
There's a long pause. "I don't think everything is fine."  
  
"No, nothing is fine," Rose laughs sadly, "but I'm home and it will be fine. I told you I'll be back."  
  
"Rose, I think you need to talk to him, he's been a complete wreck–"  
  
There's a scuffling sound and a sharp "Oi!" that's suddenly in the background and then his voice comes down the line.  
  
"Rose, don't hang up. Please."  
  
The sound of him makes her freeze, every muscle tensed and ready. Her headache increases tenfold in one instant and she closes her eyes against the pain and the longing. The longing is so, so strong.  
  
"Doctor."  
  
"Where are you?"  
  
"I'm home," she said softly. "With mum. For Christmas."  
  
"Rose, I'm sorry."  
  
"I saw. You've said a few times now."  
  
"I mean it."  
  
"I believe you."  
  
Her reply seems to bring him up short and for a long moment they only breathe together. She wonders which of them will break first. It's him.  
  
"But you don't forgive me."  
  
She doesn't have a response for that because she doesn't know. She doesn't know how she feels about any of this except that it hurts in a heavy, draining way deep inside her chest and that, wrapped around and braided through that hurt in a kind of terrible inextricableness, she misses him. He is the reason she feels this way and she wants nothing more than to crawl into his arms and have him cradle her, soothe her, kiss her until the pain is gone and there's nothing left but his taste and the scent of his skin on her.  
  
"We need to talk," he says, snapping her out of her thoughts, "but not like this. I'm going to come to London."  
  
She can hear Donna in the background, yelling at him, but she can't say she disagrees. She doesn't know how this will end, but she's pretty sure she doesn't want it to end over the phone.  
  
"Okay," she whispers, and gives him her address. He repeats it back, writes it down, promises he's going to catch the first train tomorrow, that he'll be there by noon and she just nods even though he can't see her, unable to come up with anything to say.   
  
"Rose," he says again after a minute, "I  _am_  sorry."  
  
"I know," she says again and hangs up. She crawls out of bed slowly, muscles stiff and body aching, so thirsty she can barely see straight. She fell asleep in her jeans and shoes and she feels filthy, so she strips off all her clothes slowly and climbs into the shower, turning the water as hot as she can stand it. She sobs into the scalding water, hoping this is the last time she cries like this, already tired and disgusted by how heartsick she feels. She is not a weak young woman and yet here she is, falling apart over a boy. By the end of her shower she feels cleaner and more awake than she has since Mickey showed up on her doorstep. She puts on her softest pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that isn't one she's pilfered from the Doctor and squares her shoulders before walking out to the living room. The television is on, her mother on the couch watching Eastenders though it's clear she's been waiting for her to emerge.  
  
"Sweetheart," she says when Rose appears in the doorway. She pats the sofa next to her and gestures to a mug of tea, still hot, on the cheap IKEA coffee table. Against her will Rose feels her face crumpling again. Her mother opens her arms and she rushes into them and as Jackie rocks her back and forth the whole story comes out.  
  


***

  
  
When he shows up on her doorstep he looks like shit. He is rumpled from the train, a week's worth of beard growth on his face, and bags as deep as hers underneath his eyes. He's wearing jeans and a t-shirt she bought him, light blue with "Trust me, I'm a Doctor" on the front. He'd worn it to one of his graduate student meetings and nearly been laughed out the building but it quickly became one of his favorites and seeing him wearing it now makes her stomach do the weirdest tumbles. He's got his suit jacket on over the shirt, and it's just as wrinkled as the rest of him, poking out from his favorite long brown coat. The sight of him hurts.  
  
"Rose," he says breathlessly when she answers the door. She sees his hands twitch at his sides, know he wants to reach out for her because she feels the same way, and then she remembers the way she caught the scent of Reinette's perfume on him and the way he looked rumpled and tired like he does now when she did and it steels her against him, a little bit.   
  
"Hi," she says softly and reaches for her jacket. He's about to ask when when her mother's voice floats over from the living room.  
  
"Oh is that himself, then? I've got some words for you, mister–"  
  
"Mum, we're gonna go," Rose calls, grabbing her keys from the bowl on the mail table and closing the door behind her before her mum can get another word in edgewise and the sudden movement means she's suddenly standing very close to him, their chests almost touching. His heat radiates through his clothes and hers and he looks so startled that she is suddenly so near. He raises a hand to cup her cheek and she ducks out of the way, striding towards the stairway. It takes a few seconds for him to collect himself and then he's hot on her heels. She's not really paying attention to where she's going, just leads them off the estate and to one of the playgrounds nearby.   
  
They settle on the swings, close but with enough distance between them for Rose to get her bearings back a little bit since she first saw him. They sway in silence for a few minutes, neither knowing where to start.  
  
"Rose, I'm–" he begins. She cuts him off.  
  
"Don’t say you're sorry again. I know you're sorry."  
  
"Then what should I say?"  
  
He sounds sad and lost, younger than he's ever sounded before and suddenly very much like a man and not like the mystery he tries to build himself up to be. It gives her something, sets her thoughts in order, and all of a sudden she knows what to say.  
  
"Tell me why," she implores softly. "Explain this to me. Tell me how we got here."  
  
"It's stupid," he says harshly, looking away. " _I'm_  stupid."  
  
"No, you're not. You're quite the opposite, as you're so fond of saying all the time. So use that big brain of yours, Doctor, and tell me  _why_."  
  
He is quiet for a long time. She watches him, or rather the top of his head as he's got his gaze trained on his feet and the ground.   
  
"You scare me, Rose Tyler," he mumbles after what seems like forever. "You scare me and make me do stupid things."  
  
"You can't possibly be saying this is  _my_  fault!"  
  
"No," he shakes his head and looks up and he looks so old, and so tired, "It's not your fault, you didn't do anything except being you and you didn't make me f–"  
  
He stops and she leans forward, thinking she might know what he was going to ay.  
  
"Make you what?"  
  
He shakes his head again, and doesn't answer, just plows ahead.  
  
"Mickey, he made me… jealous," he spits it out like a dirty word. "You're different around him, you know. More yourself, maybe. And it drove me crazy, watching him make you laugh, watching you being okay with laughing with him at all. I want to be the only person who makes you laugh."  
  
"People make me laugh all the time," Rose breathes, bewildered and utterly confused by what he's saying.   
  
"I know! I know how weird this all sounds, but I  _feel_  it, or I felt it when Mickey was around. I just wanted to throw him out, to lock the door and close the blinds and keep you all to myself forever. Do you know how strange that feels?"  
  
She thinks she might, thinks about what it felt like to curl up in his bed and wait for him to get home, to imagine he'd come back rolling his eyes about time wasted in the other woman's company, the way he'd mold his body around hers and they'd skip their meetings and tutorials the next day, just close the blackout curtains and keep the entire world at bay until things were right again.   
  
"I don't like it. I don't–I don't  _stay_ , Rose. When things get hard I run. I've always run. That's me, a coward every time. Ran away from home, from my shit family and I ran away from boarding school and everything that happened there. I left and I didn't look back, and yes there have been other girls and there have been many friends but all of them, I kept them all at a distance because when someone's at a distance they can't  _hurt_  you. I spent _years_  with other girls and they didn't get half as close to me as you have in three months! And then Mr. Mickey is there, cracking jokes I can't understand and making you laugh and you not throwing him out the window like I wanted you to–"  
  
She laughs at that, she can't help it, and it cracks the tension, doesn't break it entirely but now there's a big fissure where before it was the smoothest, most oppressive stone. He twists his swing so he's facing her, plastic-covered chain crossed just over his head, and tentatively nudges the toe of his trainer against hers.   
  
"When Reinette emailed me and said she'd be in town and did I want to get a drink, I just said yes. I didn't think, couldn't think, because if I  _had_ thought then I wouldn't have been able to do it. To say yes, to flirt, to hurt you. It was like I was going to pull of a BandAid, only the BandAid was you. I knew it was going to hurt, hurt worse than anything, and the only way to endure it was to get it over with quickly."  
  
"I'm not sure I like being compared to a bloody plaster," she grits out, suddenly feeling a lot more angry and a lot less numb. His eyes widen a little.  
  
"Yes, right, poor metaphor choice, I've not gotten much sleep lately."  
  
She looks away, the anger deflating a little, the empathy bubbling up unbidden. He is silent, waiting.  
  
"You think I'm not scared?" she finally says, shaking her head, "I'm  _nineteen_ , Doctor. You just… appeared, literally popped out of nowhere, helped me get my groceries inside my brand new tiny campus flat on my  _first day at university_ and a day later I was kissing you on my front stoop. As if that  _ever_  happens in real life! And then it was just every day, at your lab, at the library, at your flat, at mine. Every minute, with you. I  _swore_  after Jimmy I'd never let another man take over my life again and you did it without a second thought and I  _let_  you. I just finished my first term at university, my first time living away from home, away from mum, in a new place with new friends where I can be a new Rose, and you're telling me you went and shagged another woman because you were  _scared_?!"  
  
"I did  _not_  shag her," he corrects harshly, knuckles going white around the swing chain. "I swear to you, Rose, nothing happened. We met up with Jamie and Teagan, had a few more rounds, and I walked her back to her hotel. She kissed me in the lobby and I told her I wasn't single and left. I _swear_."  
  
"Oh, just that you weren't single, or did you even bother to mention my name?"  
  
"I'm sorry!"  
  
She's worked herself up into a proper fit now, just as angry as she was that first night when the wound was still so fresh.   
  
"Stop saying that!"  
  
"Well, what should I say? That I'd take it back, every second of it, if I could? That I'd throw Mickey out the window myself, or told Reinette I was busy, or at least that I had a girlfriend  _before_ she got to town? That I miss you too much to sleep at night and that I haven't done my laundry because the other pillow still smells like your shampoo? Or that I broke into your flat because I was so scared you'd left Oxford for good, that I'd never see you again, and I had to make sure your things were still there?  _What do you want me to say?!_ "  
  
"You broke into my flat?" she echoes, stunned by the sudden onslaught of words and anger from him. His skin is pale and eyes blazing, cheeks red under his short beard.   
  
"The locks are ridiculously easy to pick, it's appalling; it's not a safe place for you to be living at all, I don't like it."  
  
He sounds so matter-of-fact and indignant about the locks that it finally shatters the atmosphere between them; in an instant Rose is doubled over laughing, feeling a huge weight lift from her shoulders at the feeling. The Doctor does the same, perhaps a bit more tentatively, and when she composes herself again he reaches out across the short distance between them and cups her check oh so delicately.  
  
"What do you want, Rose?" he asks softly, gazing into her eyes. She feels the earth spinning under her feet again, much like the first night after matriculation. "Tell me what you want and I'll do it. I'll fetch the moon, the stars from the sky, if you want me to."   
  
"I want," she flounders for a moment, wanting everything, wanting nothing, wanting to turn back time and return to the blissful bubble they lived in before Reinette, wanting to push forward into a new world ahead of them, to be a new woman and with him a new couple, better and brighter and real. She takes a deep breath, trying to figure out how to say all of this, and catches a scent on the breeze.  
  
"I want… chips," she says. He goes completely still, mouth falling open a little bit in surprise, then spreading into a wide grin.  
  
"Chips," he echoes, "Yeah, I want chips too."  
  


***

  
  
She invites him 'round for Christmas dinner and he accepts, promising to be on his best behavior as long as she promises she'll keep her mother from killing him dead. Indeed, it seems to be a legitimate fear because when she gets home Jackie lays into her, demanding every detail of their conversation and wasting no opportunity to insult the Doctor in any way. When Rose tells her he'll be joining them for dinner she puts up a massive fuss but seems, to Rose anyway, secretly pleased at the prospect of meeting this boy who her daughter is so taken with. That hidden glee makes Rose very, very worried that she's done a bad thing.   
  
Christmas morning they open presents as usual, and she coos appropriately over the clothing and the book she asked for, and helps her mother start the turkey, and watches telly in her pajamas as she's supposed to, but there's a nervous flutter in her stomach all day long. She wants to call Donna, to tell her everything and ask her what to do, but she doesn't. This is between them and if this is going to work, if she's going to make this work, she's going to have to do it herself. There will be time to share later — probably within an hour of her arrival back in Oxford, actually, if she were to lay odds; right now this is about her, and the Doctor, and no one else.  
  
Which is, of course, when Mickey arrives. She forgot about their annual tradition and she's not about to demand he leave when she knows he's got no family to have dinner with, but this is not what she was hoping for with so much riding on this evening.   
  
Mickey is bashful and contrite and he apologizes for showing up in Oxford unannounced, apologizes for not leaving when it became clear he wasn't entirely welcome, and apologizes for acting like such a dick when the evening with Reinette happened, and after. Rose accepts his apologies and apologizes herself for screaming at him and also assaulting him with citrus fruit and he laughs and she laughs and then tells him the Doctor is coming for dinner. She doesn't miss the way Mickey's mouth goes tight and his eyes harden, knows that perhaps he had still hoped there was a chance they'd rekindle what they had, but even if she can't make this work with the Doctor she knows there is no going back to Mickey. If nothing else she has decided what kind of woman she's going to be and that future does not include him. She hopes that maybe, with this truly over, he sees a better future for himself as well.  
  
She texts the Doctor to warn him before she showers and when she gets out there is still no reply. She tries her hardest not to be nervous.   
  
She takes extra time with hair and makeup but in the end Christmas dinner at the Tyler's has never been a formal affair so there's no reason to dress up. She selects her jeans carefully, a pair she knows makes her bum look good, and dons a t-shirt and soft hoodie and just… hopes. Hopes he wants her as much as she wants him, hopes this is not all in her head, hopes that maybe once this is all settled she can get her head back on straight because damned if she hasn't felt like a whole different person this past week. She misses adventuring with the Doctor, dragging him around Oxford and getting them into trouble without even trying, and the way he always let her, trusted her instincts even when they were awful. She is a clever girl and she'd like to get back to being clever, thanks.  
  
They've just put the food on the table when there's a knock at the flat's door. Jackie calls that it's open before Rose can move to answer it and the Doctor steps past the threshold, eyes already on her. He's wearing his favorite brown suit, clearly freshly cleaned and pressed, a light blue button down shirt and the brown tie with blue swirlies on it, which she's seen him wear to countless meetings with his dissertation committee. She likes that tie, and he knows it. He's freshly shaven as well, hair clean and perfectly coiffed, a small pile of neatly wrapped presents in his hands. The Doctor, she realizes, meant everything he said to her at the playground, maybe in ways she can't fully understand. When she finally tears her eyes away from his body and up to his face he gives her a wide, cocky grin.   
  
Cheeky wanker.  
  
He sits next to her, at the head of the table, and keeps his eyes on her the entire night. He watches her while answering her mother's questions about his studies and how long he's lived in Oxford and his different boarding schools and nomadic childhood. His gaze linger as he helps serve the turkey and the peas. Her mother fetches Christmas crackers and he wins the pull with Mickey, slipping the red paper crown on while tapping his knee against hers. She feels lighter and more buoyant than she has for a long time, since before the debacle, since before end of term began, really, and he looks devastating and she wants to kiss him more than she wants to breathe. His fingers brush hers when he hands her the next cracker and she shivers.  
  
The pop of the cardboard and paper pull her out of her daze a little bit, long enough to slip on the bright pink crown and joke that it should be her mum's. Jackie, for her part, shoots her daughter a knowing glance and excuses herself and Mickey to watch the Queen's speech, just starting on the telly that's been on throughout dinner. The Doctor rises to follow and Rose seizes her opportunity, grabbing his hand and pulling him down the hall towards her room instead. She doesn't open the door, doesn't open that can of worms, but she pulls him into the shadows, into a little corner for whatever privacy she can grab.  
  
"Rose–" he begins and she doesn't let him finish, just rises up on tiptoe and smashes her lips to his.  
  
His reaction is instant. His arms go around her and he  _squeezes_ , hauling her against him so hard that all her breath rushes out in one big puff even as she latches onto his neck with every ounce of strength in her arms. He slants his mouth over hers and plunges his tongue inside, taking a long draught from her lips. She sees stars behind her eyelids, tries to pull away for any air at all and manages just a sip because he will not let her go, follows her instead, bending her over backwards as he kisses her and kisses her and kisses her. She thinks she's going to faint, from lack of air and the way her heart is pounding so hard she's sure he must be able to feel it, and that's when he lets go, pressing his forehead to hers as they pant. He can't quite stop kissing her, not really, brushing bruised lips over bruised lips, sipping her taste instead of the air now, his hands sliding down her back towards her bum and then back up again. She rocks her hips forward, wanting his touch everywhere, and feels him there, hard already.   
  
"Rose," he says again, voice shaking in a way she knows hers would if she tried to speak. She can't, can't even open her eyes, letting the vibrations from each tiny peck resonate through her, make her quiver. "Rose, I love you."  
  
Her eyes fly open; it's not what she's expecting. She stares at him, unable to speak or think for a long moment. Perhaps too long; panic blooms in his eyes.  
  
"I love you," she manages, means it but can barely get it out. Everything about this moment feels too big to fit inside her chest, she feels like she's about to explode. "I do, I love you."  
  
He swoops down to kiss her again, bodies clinched together as tight as possible, thighs and bellies and chests and mouths all pressed together so tightly it's like they're trying to climb inside each other. In some ways they are. He keeps whispering the words against her lips and in the living room the Queen wishes Britain a merry Christmas.

 


	5. Chapter 5

_Spring_  
  
When Rose was fifteen and still living on the estate, dreaming of a life beyond the concrete and grime of East London, of something better and bigger and brighter, when she first set her sights on Oxford University and all the promises it held innate, it was the days like this she imagined.  
  
The Doctor wakes her up mid-morning with a kiss and a cuppa, picnic in the works in the kitchen, and by in the works he really means scattered on every counter and available piece of table surface leaving Donna exasperated, bleary-eyed in her robe. Rose tries her best to apologize for him but Donna knows him too well, knows  _her_  too well now too, so she just pushes things out of her way and makes her tea and heads back to her room and Lee and what she feels like getting up to on this sunny, crisp, day. The Doctor buzzes about in his trousers and no shirt, finishing sandwiches and wrapping hunks of cheese in wax paper as she sits at the kitchen table in one of his button downs, knees pulled up to her chest and mug at her lips, hiding her face as she watches him bustle. She loves mornings like this, when domestics are everything and she feels like she has him to keep forever. He pauses periodically to come over and kiss her silly, to pull the collar of his shirt out of the way and nip at her neck, but always pulls away when she tries to entice him back to bed. He's got plans for them, she can tell.  
  
It takes some prodding to get her to get dressed, less prodding for him to get her into that skirt he likes, the one that's not actually short but swishes in such a way that the wind bares her thighs against her will and he can get his hands up it so easily. It has warmed up delightfully quickly, so she foregoes a bra in favor of just a tight white vest and one of his cardigans, leaving him speechless but not quite far enough gone to put him off his scheme, whatever it is. He pulls on a jumper himself as she tries to unbutton his trousers, batting her hands away and making threats, promises, that make her tongue sneak out from between her teeth when she grins.   
  
That comes closest to success for keeping them in the house.  
  
But not quite.  
  
Rose teases him about how much food he's packing up in the rucksack, cracking jokes about his skinny legs and narrow hips as she stands behind him, leaning her cheek on his back and tracing body parts with her palms as she names them. He just smiles and takes her hand, leading her out the door. They walk for quite a while, quite content to bask in the sunlight and fresh air, until she catches onto their destination. They stroll up to the banks of The Isis where Jamie and Teagan and waiting for them with Martha and Tom, the other medical student she's been seeing since just before Christmas. They have bottles of wine and beer to compliment their snacks and it all falls into place for Rose; it's March and the spring regattas have begun.  
  
The crowd is raucous, students decked out in their colleges' scarves, sweatshirts, some of them waving pennants as well, cheering school cheers and ragging on rivals in their midst. The Doctor settles with his knees spread and Rose settles against him, her back to his chest, her arms looped over his thighs. She feels warm here, safe and content, waiting for the crews to pass by. They can hear them, each heat approaching on a wave of cheers and chants, and they jump up to cheer them on too, laughing and chattering as they eat and drink.  
  
The races end near sundown but no one is ready to leave, so they stay longer, stretched out across from each other and gossiping about the worst of the undergraduates ("Not you, Rose," the Doctor assures her when she pretends to take offense, "Never you, you're brilliant") and the batty old professors, getting drunker and happier and more relaxed. Martha falls asleep against Tom's shoulder for a while so he makes their excuses by himself, pulling her up and leading her off to his car to take them back home. Jamie and Teagan stick around a little longer but they're ready for a shower and a sleep themselves, full of wine and cheer, and with them goes the blanket, forcing Rose and the Doctor to sit up as well. They pack up slowly, pretty full of booze themselves, and when the last of it is in the rucksack and hoisted onto the Doctor's shoulders, Rose practically pounces. He catches her — he always does — and draws her close, leaning down to rub their noses together.  
  
"Thank you," she murmurs. "This has been a lovely day."  
  
"A lovely day, with lovely company, and a lovely woman in my arms," he murmurs back. "Can't complain."  
  
She kisses him slowly, thoroughly, all the warmth and contentedness that's been flowing through her veins all day coming to pool deep in her belly, between her legs, in the middle of her chest. His hands drag down her back, over her skirt and pause on her arse to get a good handful. She rocks her hips into his, encouraging, and a low whistle breaks the moment. She pulls away slowly, a shy grin on her face, one she sees reflected back to her on his.   
  
"Take me home?" she suggests and he pulls her in tight to his side, wrapping one arm around her shoulders as he begins to lead them in the direction of her flat. A little extra privacy tonight, she agrees, would be lovely.   
  
They can't quite keep their hands off each other as they walk. First her hand moves from his waist into his back pocket, wanting a handful of her own, which makes him jump and squeak and giggle as it always does. He tucks her in a little closer, matching their steps as he drops his wrist over her collarbone, and looks down at her, carefully leaning in for a kiss as he keeps them walking. She almost trips over her own feet, probably would if he wasn't doing such a good job keeping them on track and, miraculously, not running into every lamp pole lining the sidewalk. He manages to keep it up for a couple blocks before they almost collide with an older couple and a trashcan all at the same time. The trashcan seems pretty indifferent to the near-miss but the couple are less pleased and snap at them to quit acting like idiots. The Doctor grins at her and grabs her hand, shouting "Run!" before taking off down the street, dragging her along behind him.   
  
She squeals with delight and laughter as she follows, trying to keep up until the laughter and the drink and the night and all the feelings rushing around in place of her blood conspire to give her a stitch in her side. She stutters to a stop, letting go of his hand and pulling him up short in front of her, nearly short enough to cause a collision of their own. As she catches her breath she realizes she has no idea where they are.  
  
"Doc- Doctor," she pants out, arching languidly into him as he catches her hands again, both of them, and pulls her close to his chest. "Where are we?"  
  
"No idea," he admits, leaning down to kiss her quickly, and hard. It makes her a little dizzy. "More fun that way. Why, you in a rush to get somewhere?"  
  
"Well,  _yeah_ ," she rolls her eyes and presses her palm to the front of his trousers, squeezing delicately. His hips rock forward and oh yes, there is something for her to grab onto already. She pokes her tongue out the corner of her mouth as she grins up at him.   
  
"Er, right," he chuckles and kisses her again, cupping her face as her arms go round his waist, holding her in just the right way to let him plunder her mouth. She fights for control, tongue darting and twisting around his, trying to get to him as much as he's got her, and when he pulls away for a breath she catches his bottom lip light between her teeth and tugs. He shudders and uses one arm around her waist to haul her against him. He walks them backwards slowly, glancing behind her whenever he pulls away for breath, until her back hits something solid — like a wall but not a wall, not a fence or a hedge either, something wooden maybe like a door. She curious but not curious enough to give up nibbling on his mouth, moving her hands up to his neck and then into his hair, twisting and pulling at the strands. She loves his hair, she dreams about it sometimes when she's sleeping and can barely leave it alone when she's awake, and she takes full advantage at every possible moment, like this one for example. In this moment she runs her fingers through it, up to the crown of his head, and then scratches her nails along his scalp on the way back down. A shiver runs through his entire body and he grows noticeably harder against her hip.  
  
She's been neglecting that area, she realizes, and lets go of that glorious hair with one hand to try to get her other between them, to hold and rub and squeeze and tease. She has completely forgotten they are on the street, out in the open; they are in their own bubble, completely wrapped up in each other, as if the sheer force of their want and need has created an invisibility cloak around them. It hasn't, of course, which is why when the Doctor is just getting a good handful of her breast over her vest a group of students walks by and unleashes another round of wolf whistles and rude comments.   
  
It pops the bubble way too easily.  
  
" _Doctor_ ," she implores, breathing heavy as she stares at his swollen mouth, transfixed, "C'mon, we've gotta get home."  
  
She rocks against him again to emphasize the urgency of that, a shudder running through her this time as his thigh catches her in just the right spot and  _oh_ she is so ready to be home, she was ready to be home hours ago, they could be on their second or third round of this by now, but they're on a _street_ instead, a street she doesn't even  _recognize_. Oh, she's gonna  _kill_  him, right after she makes him come hard enough to forget his own name.   
  
Just the thought of it makes her groan and she tries to push at him but he just holds her tighter against the wall.   
  
"Oh it's a nice thought but I can't," he says, "I  _cannot_  wait another second to be inside you, Rose Tyler. I have wanted you all day, the way you laugh and the way you smell and the way you taste, and if you thought I didn't notice that little  _wiggle_  you did every time you sat in my lap then you weren't wiggling right!"  
  
That last declaration is paired with another thrust, his erection unmistakable through his trousers and she is quite aware he noticed, wasn't quite sure at the time why they stayed so late, is even less sure now. It seemed like fun but this seems like more fun and now it's going to be more-delayed fun and that is  _not_  fair.  
  
While she's been trying to keep her knees from buckling he's reached into his pocket for something and she nearly laughs, nearly breaks the mood by doing so, when he pulls out the little modified eyeglass screwdriver he's been carrying around with him now for months. ( _He showed it to her when she returned from Christmas vacation and demanded to know how he broke into her flat anyway, what with the school-installed locks, and had been hurt when she'd laughed. Later that night she'd been examining it on the night table from her position draped across his chest, teasing him as he pouted, Oh come on, Rose, it's not_  just > _a screwdriver! It's… Well, like, what if it was sonic? Her subsequent fit of hysterics sent him into a sulk that lasted right up until she was licking that spot on the inside of his left thigh._ ) She's tempted to tease him about it again, even as he takes the opportunity while he… fiddles with whatever he's fiddling with to grind his thigh against her center, sending spikes of pleasure from the base off her spine all the way up to the top of her head. She grinds back in return and pulls his head down to kiss him, leaving him blind but determined nonetheless.  
  
She realizes, slowly, that he's attempting to unlock some kind of door and breaks away to look up. He leans over her shoulder as she tries to crane her neck so she can see what, exactly, she's been leaning against this whole time, and with his triumphant cry and they tumble through a doorway. She catches blue paint and a little white painted sign, faded with time and deep neglect, and realizes he's let them into one of those old police boxes that are scattered randomly about town, the ones from the 1960's that haven't been used in decades, certainly not during her lifetime. Oxford is an old place that loves its relics and the blue boxes, like the medieval ruins and Edwardian townhomes, are just part of its collection of oddities and objects distilled out of time. She has a second to be impressed that there are only old newspapers and leaves on the ground and no apparent molds or other living things on the walls before the Doctor has kicked the door shut behind them and plunged the tiny space into darkness.  
  
"What, you makin' a citizen's arrest?" she quips, running her hands from his shoulders down his chest and to the front of his trousers, finally popping that button open as she's wanted to all day. He likewise wastes no time yanking her vest out of the waist of her skirt and pushing it up, exposing her bare breasts to his eyes and mouth. He bends, latching onto the tip of her left breast, the one she thinks he might favor for reasons she can't fathom, and swirling his tongue around her nipple. She arches up into him, holding his head in place.   
  
"Oh,  _please_ …"  
  
He detaches reluctantly, but appears to get over it when she shimmies out of her knickers.   
  
She yanks messily at his clothes, trying to get his trousers and pants down as he reaches beneath her skirt and strokes her, teasing at first and then easing his fingers inside of her. Her head knocks back against the wall of the police box, knees buckling properly this time, driving his hand deeper, and it feels spectacular. She moans, loudly, and he covers her mouth with his to muffle the sound, sliding out of her so he can try to find the best corner of the booth to fuck her in. While he feels around over head she finally gets his trousers down his thighs and takes hold of him properly, stroking slowly a couple times before bending over to lick the tip. It's his turn to lose his footing a bit and she chuckles low in her throat as she takes his cock more fully into her mouth, savoring his taste. She gets in one good suck before he slips for real. She expects a crash and an end to this little escapade but instead there's a muffled thump and a hum of pleased surprise.  
  
"There's a bench!" he laughs, delighted. She laughs, too, as she hears him shift around on his bum. His  _bare_  bum.  
  
"Oi, it's filthy!" she cries and whips off the cardigan, "Here, here, sit on this."  
  
"I suppose you it could take the police a while to come," he muses, taking it from her and she can hear him shift to lay it down and then sit on top of it, "Couldn’t expect you to stand that whole time–"  
  
"Doctor," she interrupts, throwing one leg over his thighs and straddling his lap, her knees fitting comfortably on either side of his hips. She can feel gooseflesh break out on his neck and his fingers dig into her hips. "If we're in a police box, shouldn't we do something worth getting arrested for?"  
  
He laughs, low and breathy, and reaches between them, dragging his cock through her wetness, teasing them both for a moment. She pushes her hair off his face and then cups his cheeks, staring through the darkness to catch the sparkle in his eyes. He makes one last adjustment and she slides smoothly down on him.   
  
They moan together and she raises back up slowly, feeling every centimeter of him slide out and then, with a sharp tug from his hands, plunge back in. She arches her back, bracing hands on shoulders, and starts to ride him in earnest, squeaking when he begins to suckle her breast again, first the left, then the right, then the left again. His short nails dig into her side and the small of her back as he holds her steady, hips bucking up to meet her every downstroke pushing deeper. She can feel her orgasm building in the base of her spine and tingling through her scalp, a pleasure warm and thick like honey cascading down her skin to pool in her center, build and build until she feels like she's about to burst. He moves his face to her neck, biting down (he marks her all the time, every time, a badge that she is his and she wears it proudly), muttering words into her neck as he grows more frantic beneath her.  _Please_  and  _oh_  and  _fuck_  and  _Rose_ , her name, always her name. She can feel his thighs flexing when hers bounce against them and she pulls at his jumper, exposing stomach and chest, raking her nails through the hair there with one hand as the other clings to his neck for dear life.  
  
In the last moments before the wave of pleasure crashes to shore she feels as if she can see through time and space, down to the center of the universe and in that little particle as tiny as nothing and big as everything, the whole of all creation, there is him, only him, kneeling to retrieve her keys on her front stoop and broken on the old dingy swingset and tucked up in her bed and underneath her now, sweating and rutting and begging her to come, to set him free. She closes her eyes against the vision, too big for her to feel along with everything else in this moment, and shouts his name as the wave crests and she is swept away, away, away.  
  
When she comes back to herself he is panting against her throat, murmuring her name and endearments, and she laughs, laughs because she is so happy, and so free, and because she has everything she ever could want, and a beautiful, wonderful man besides.   
  
"Oh, Rose, " he says against her skin, "Love. Darling. Sweetheart."

 


End file.
